IN  A  MOME 
OF  T 


i 


V* 


R-WKAUFTEMAN 


IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 


OTHER    BOOKS    BY 

REGINALD  WRIGHT  KAUFFMAN: 


Novels : 

The  House  of  Bondage 

The  Sentence  of  Silence 

Running  Sands 

The  Spider's  Web 

The  Chasm 

Jarvis  of  Harvard 

The  Things  That  Are  Csesar's 

Jim     (To     be    published     in 
May) 


Romances: 

Miss   Frances   Baird,   Detec- 
tive 

My  Heart  and  Stephanie 

Anthologies: 

The  Book  of  Love 
The  Book  of  Friendship 
The  Book  of  Gratitude 
The  Book  of  Good  Cheer 


Ethics  and  Economics: 
The  Way  of  Peace 
What  Is  Socialism? 


A  Collection  of  Short  Stories: 
The  Girl  That  Goes  Wrong 


A  Volume  of  Epigrams: 
The  Bachelor's  Guide 


Verse : 
•'Little  Old  Belgium" 


:  -4 


From    a    photograph    by    A.    II.    Savage    Landor   from    L' Illustration. 

All  that  Is  Left  Them 

The  King  and  Queen  of  the  Belgians  on  an  unconquered  strip  of 

sea  beach. 


IN   A   MOMENT 
OF  TIME 

Things  Seen  on  the  Bread-Line 
of  Belgium 


BY 


REGINALD  WRIGHT  KAUFFMAN 


"n 


NEW  YORK 

MOFFAT,  YARD  AND  COMPANY 

1915 


Copyright,  1915, 
Bv  MOFFAT,  YARD  &  COMPANY 


TO 
THE  WOMEN  AND  CHILDREN 

OF   BELGIUM, 
TO 

THEIR  AGED  AND  INFIRM: 

To  those  kindly,  peaceable,  courageous 
folk,  those  thousands  who,  "in  a  moment 
of  time,"  have  been  robbed  of  husbands, 
sons  and  lovers;  who  have  been  tortured, 
violated;  who  have  lost  their  homes  and 
means  of  livelihood;  who  today  face  star- 
vation because  their  protectors  scorned 
temptation  and  set  honor  above  life; 
to  them  and 

10 
ALL  THOSE  AMERICANS 

who  are  helping  them  in  their  dark 
hour  of  need. 

Belgium,   jnd   Aug.,    1914: 

And  the  devil,  taking  him  up  into  a  high  mountain,  showed  unto  him 
all  the  kingdoms  of  the  world  in  o  moment  of  time.  And  the  devil  said 
unto  him  : 

"All  this  power  will  I  give  thec,  and  the  glory  of  them:  for  that  is 
delivered  unto  me,  and  to  whomsoever  I  will,  I  give  it.  If  thou  there- 
fore will   worship   me,  all  sluill  be  thine." 

"  Get  thee  behind  me,  Satan;  for  it  is  written,  '  Thou  shall  worship 
the  Lord  thy  God,  and  hi  in  only  slialt  thou  serve.   " 


PREFACE 

It  was  my  fortune  to  see  something  of  Bel- 
gium in  wartime,  and  I  have  here  tried  to  tell  at 
least  a  part  of  what  I  saw.  Nevertheless,  ex- 
cept perhaps  for  the  narrative  of  the  early  rush 
to  Ostend  and  the  final  bombardment  of  Ant- 
werp, this  is  not,  in  current  phrase,  "another 
war-book"  at  all :  it  is  not  an  account  of  deeds 
observed  on  the  Firing-Line;  it  is  at  best  but 
an  inadequate  record  of  some  incidents  ob- 
served on  the  Bread-Line.  When  I  read  Mr. 
E.  Alexander  Powell's  vivid  "Fighting  in 
Flanders"  and  Mr.  Richard  Harding  Davis's 
thrilling  chronicle  of  his  experiences  "With  the 
Allies,"  I  perceived  immediately  that  a  record 
of  what  little  I  observed  of  actual  fighting 
would  have  small  value  beside  those  better-in- 
formed volumes.  But  I  did  see  enough  of  the 
actual  fighting  and  enough  of  the  suffering  of 
those  who  could  not  fight  to  know  that  of  the 

vii 


viii  PREFACE 

latter  and  their  needs  too  much  could  not  be 
written:  to  feel  that  it  is  the  duty  of  every 
American  man  and  woman  who  has  any  first- 
hand knowledge  of  the  Belgian  non-combat- 
ants' distress  to  lay  that  knowledge  before  the 
generous  people  of  the  United  States.  This, 
then,  simply  represents  my  small  contribution 
to  the  needs  of  Belgium's  innocent  dispos- 
sessed; I  have  merely  tried  to  tell  my  fellow- 
countrymen,  as  well  as  I  hurriedly  can,  a  little 
of  what  I  know  of  events  and  conditions  that 
call,  and  cannot  call  in  vain,  for  every  bit  of 
such  help  as  material  gifts  can  convey. 

As  for  my  own  attitude  toward  the  rights 
and  wrongs  of  the  present  war,  it  is  enough  to 
say  that,  though  the  first  of  August,  19 14, 
found  me  a  neutral,  I  soon  became  but  a  partial 
neutral,  and  what  I  subsequently  saw  of  the 
things  done  to  inoffensive  Belgian  burghers  and 
villagers  left  me,  if  a  neutral,  a  very  partial  one 
indeed.  I  cannot  do  better  than  quote  Mr. 
Powell:  "I  am  pro-Belgian;  I  should  be 
ashamed  to  be  anything  else."  Frankly,  it  is 
in  this  spirit  that  I  have  written.     I  have  not 


PREFACE  ix 

told  all  that  I  saw  or  heard,  but  I  have  sup- 
pressed nothing  that  was  to  the  advantage  of 
the  Germans,  nothing  that  was  to  the  disad- 
vantage of  the  Belgians.  Several  of  the  in- 
cidents narrated  came  to  me  at  second-hand, 
but  T  have  set  down  nothing  that  did  not  have 
plentiful  corroboration,  and  I  have  repeated 
nothing  that  did  not  come  from  reliable  sources 
and  persons  of  authority. 

Some  portions  of  certain  chapters  in  this 
book  were  originally  published  in  The  Saturday 
Evening  Post,  Leslie's  Weekly,  the  London 
Chronicle,  the  London  Express,  the  Philadel- 
phia Ledger,  the  Philadelphia  North  American 
and  the  New  York  Times.  My  thanks  are  due 
to  the  editors  of  those  publications  for  their 
permission  to  reprint. 

These  portions  were  of  considerable  assist- 
ance to  me,  but  so  far  as  form  was  concerned, 
they  for  the  most  part  required,  when  taken 
from  the  daily  or  weekly  press  and  placed  in 
a  book,  to  be  entirely  rewritten.  1  landed  in 
New  York  from  England  on  January  5th,  and 
found  that,  if  it  were  to  appear  in  time  to  be 


x  PREFACE 

of  any  effect  in  assisting  the  work  of  the  vari- 
ous committees  for  Belgian  relief,  the  manu- 
script of  this  volume  must  be  completed  by  the 
fifth  of  February.  That  condition  I  have 
managed  to  meet ;  but  it  necessitated  writing  at 
a  speed  that  I  am  fully  aware  has  left  a  great 
deal  to  be  desired.  I  hope  only  that,  whatever 
the  lapses  due  to  this  hurry,  they  will  not  im- 
pede the  appeal  that  I  have  tried  to  make. 

R.  W.  K. 

New  York, 

5th  February,  191 5. 


IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 


SUNSHINE  IN   BELGIUM 

I  suppose  it  did  rain,  sometimes,  in  Belgium. 
It  must  have,  you  know.  The  land  was  a  gar- 
den, and  there  can't,  alas,  be  gardens  without 
rain,  so  I  suppose  Belgium  had  its  wet  days 
even  before  its  Dark  Day  began.  I  can't,  how- 
ever, remember  any — back  there.  To  be  sure 
my  wife  says  that,  on  her  first  visit  to  Antwerp, 
there  was  rain  every  other  hour;  but  I  have 
only  her  word  for  it.  To  be  sure,  too,  in  one 
of  my  old  diaries  I  find  the  entry :  'To  Bruges 
on  horseback;  good  roads;  some  rain" — and, 
by  severe  concentration,  I  do  seem  to  get  the 
faint  impression  of  a  few  drops  falling  between 
vast  patches  of  blue;  yet  that  is  probably  more 
suggestion  than  memory;  it  is  all  anything  but 

13 


14         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

convincing.  Certainly  I  shall  ever  remember 
the  land  as  it  was  during  my  last  stay  in  it  be- 
fore the  Great  Storm.  No,  I  really  don't  recol- 
lect any  rain  in  that  Belgium  whatever.  To 
me  it  will  always  remain  Smiling  Belgium,  a 
country  of  sunshine. 

There  are  some  children  born  with  the  mus- 
cles of  their  brows  so  formed  that  they  cannot 
frown:  Belgium  was  one  of  these  children. 
Here  and  there  comes  a  bit  of  gently  rolling 
country;  behind  Namur  lies  the  forest  of  Ar- 
dennes, whence  Sir  Walter's  "Wild  Boar"  took 
his  soubriquet;  but  the  billows  of  that  rolling 
country  were  as  smiles  passing  over  the  earth's 
face,  and  wherever  the  Ardennes  threatened  a 
grim  wildness,  dead-and-gone  Belgians  had 
planted  a  pretty  sixteenth-century  chateau  to 
laugh  the  threat  away.  All  the  rest  of  the  land 
is  flat ;  it  is  a  chess-board  on  which  the  squares 
were  green  fields,  or  immaculate  villages,  and 
the  dividing-lines  hedges,  or  canals,  or  long, 
straight,  white  roads  bordered  by  twin  rows  of 
Lombardy-poplars  that  converged  at  the  van- 
ishing-point.    Louvain   was   only   eighty-two 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM  15 

feet  above  sea-level,  Bruges  is  scarcely  thirty. 
Belgium  was  topographically  impeded  from 
frowning,  and  she  loved  the  inhibition. 

The  people  themselves  were  sunshine-folk. 
Not  fair-weather  friends  in  the  sense  of  the 
proverbial  expression — loyal  friends  for  all 
weathers,  the  Belgians  I  knew — but  folk  that 
had  sunshine  coursing  through  their  veins,  and 
could  not  get  rid  of  it  without  bleeding  to  death. 
They  have  bled  enough  now ;  but  then — 

You  were  warmed  by  it  the  moment  you 
landed  in  Belgium.  The  douaniers  winked  at 
a  few  extra  cigars ;  the  State  Railways  took  you 
over  a  system  innocent  of  that  melancholy  con- 
trivance elsewhere  known  as  a  first-class  car- 
riage; the  country-folk  smiled  at  you  as  you 
passed  among  their  smiling  fields;  the  cities 
beamed  on  you  from  Gothic  spire  and  Flemish 
tavern.  "Brussels" — so  runs  the  Latin  rhyme 
— "rejoices  in  its  noble  men,  Antwerp  in  wealth, 
Ghent  in  halters,  Bruges  in  pretty  girls,  Lou- 
vain  in  pundits  and  Malines  in  fools":  from 
only  the  third  and  sixth  of  those  statements  do 
I  dissent,  and  I  call  your  attention  to  the  fact 


16         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

that  even  the  monk  who  made  them  could  find 
no  adequate  verb  but  "gawdere." 

Its  adequacy  persisted  until  the  August  of 
1 9 14.  Industrious,  but  quiet,  the  Belgians 
were ;  thrifty,  but  generous  and,  excepting  the 
Danes,  the  most  hospitable  folk  under  Heaven. 
Troubles,  industrial  and  other,  there  sometimes 
were,  but  troubles  met  with  a  brave  smile  and 
contested  with  a  sympathy  for  the  man  on  the 
other  side  of  the  question:  I  remember  a 
striking  miner — "We  must  win,"  said  he,  "be- 
cause we  are  right ;  but  we  must  not  forget  that 
our  mine-owners  think  themselves  right  also." 
Those  Belgians  loved  peace  and  were  of  a  gen- 
eration unacquainted  with  war.  They  main- 
tained a  great  sea-trade,  but  were  a  stay-at- 
home  nation:  one  friend  of  mine,  who  lived 
within  fifty  miles  of  the  coast,  never  saw  the 
ocean  until  carried  in  a  hospital-ship  to  Eng- 
land. Their  ideals  were  simple:  to  obey  the 
laws;  to  earn  as  much  money  as  would  keep 
them  through  a  gentle  old  age ;  to  rear  children 
that  would  follow  in  their  parents'  ways,  and 
to  do  this  cheerfully,  enjoying  work  and  taking 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM  17 

time  to  play,  glad  to  be  alive  and  thanking  God 
for  their  gladness. 

Belgium  was  once  the  battle-ground  of  some 
of  the  fiercest  of  religious-wars  (to  use  that  ex- 
traordinary phrase)  in  history,  and  yet  it  had 
become  of  all  lands  the  least  religiously  trou- 
bled. I  do  not  mean  that  the  Belgians  were 
irreligious.  On  the  contrary,  they  were  a  pious 
people;  but  I  do  mean  that  they  become  respec- 
ters of  the  individual's  right  to  believe  as  he 
pleases,  and  that  to  each  of  them  his  religion 
was  something  to  be  glad  of  and  not  frightened 
or  angry  about.  I  think  a  Belgian  peasant  put 
it  correctly:  ''There  are,"  he  said,  "only  three 
religions  in  Belgium — the  Church,  the  Protes- 
tants and  the  Socialists."  The  Socialists — 
well,  they  were  what  their  Mr.  Vandervelde  is, 
which  is  to  say  very  able ;  the  Protestants  were 
very  able  too;  and  as  for  the  Catholics,  who 
were  in  a  vast  majority,  they  trooped  happily 
to  their  beautiful  churches:  I  never  saw  a 
frowning  priest  in  Belgium. 

Until  Germany  and  the  other  Great  Powers 
declared  it  a  neutral  country,  Belgium  had  been 


18         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

well  called  the  cock-pit  of  Europe,  had  been  the 
convenient  field  whereto  the  champions  of  her 
big  neighbors  adjourned  to  fight  out  their  dif- 
ferences ;  and  yet,  once  that  neutrality  appeared 
assured,  Belgium  itself  became  of  all  nations 
the  most  trustingly  pacific.  Switzerland  was 
guarded  by  her  Alps ;  Belgium  lay  open  by  sea 
and  land.  Belgium  was  between  states  that 
shook  their  fists  at  one  another  across  that  se- 
rene head;  here  were  desirable  industries,  a 
delectable  commerce,  an  envied  ocean-coast. 
Belgium's  wonderful  forts  had  been  built  more 
as  interesting  military  experiments  than  with 
any  thought  of  actual  need;  the  Belgian  army 
no  alien  considered  seriously.  The  little  coun- 
try's one  real  guard  was  the  pledges  of  the  sur- 
rounding governments.  That  was  the  one  real 
chain  of  effective  fortifications:  that  Scrap  of 
Paper;  but  it  was  backed  by  the  sworn  honor 
of  mighty  peoples:  nothing  could  harm  Bel- 
gium. What  had  people  and  kingdom  to  fear  ? 
I  used  to  ask  Belgians  about  their  country's 
position  in  case  of  a  European  conflict:  many 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM  19 

sorts  of  questions  of  every  sort  of  people.  I 
received  only  one  sort  of  answer : 

''They  have  given  their  promise  to  respect 
our  neutrality.  They  themselves,  jointly,  im- 
posed neutrality  upon  us.  That  Belgium 
should  be  overrun  or  invaded,  that  Belgium 
should  be  involved  in  any  European  war  which 
could  occur — it  is  quite  impossible.  We  have 
the  word  of  all  of  them." 

That  was  it,  and  they  said  it  with  a  kindly 
smile  for  my  absurd,  my  preposterous,  fore- 
bodings: the  statesman  and  the  peasant,  the 
rich  merchant  of  Antwerp  and  the  small 
farmer  of  West  Flanders.  What  I  suggested 
simply  could  not  be. 

Especially  did  the  people  trust  Germany. 
One  found  it  so  everywhere.  A  cabinet-min- 
ister said  to  me: 

"Germany  has  promised  to  respect  our  neu- 
trality, and  Germany  does  not  break  her  word. 
The  Germans  are  not  liars." 

Said  a  business-man  of  Antwerp: 

"Belgium's  commercial  relations  with  Ger- 


20         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

many  are  of  the  closest  and  most  friendly  sort. 
There  are  hundreds  of  Germans  in  Belgium 
whom  Belgium  has  made  rich.  We  do  all  that 
we  can  to  attract  German  capital,  and,  in  re- 
turn, Belgian  money  pours  into  Germany: 
Germany  is  grateful." 

"Germany,"  declared  an  Hainaut  peasant — • 
"Germany  is  Belgium's  big  brother." 

This  faith  had  one  effect  that  testifies  to  the 
genuineness  of  its  cause.  National-anthems 
are  born  of  international  conflicts,  or  of  the  ex- 
pectation of  such  conflicts.  So  strong  was  the 
Belgian's  belief  in  the  Prussian-signed  treaty 
to  preserve  Belgium's  neutrality  that  he  never 
made  himself,  musician  though  he  is,  a  na- 
tional-hymn. All  over  England,  now,  they  are 
playing  "La  Brabangonne"  in  the  belief  that 
it  has  always  been  to  Belgium  what  "God  Save 
the  King"  is  to  Great  Britain.  "La  Braban- 
gonne" was  not  that.  It  was,  as  its  name 
should  plainly  show,  a  provincial  song  of  the 
district  of  Brabant;  it  was  no  more  national 
than  "The  Lancashire  Lass"  is  "Rule  Britan- 
nia," or  than  "Maryland,  My  Maryland"  is 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM  21 

"The  Star-Spangled  Banner."  Only  this  war 
has  raised  it,  among  the  Belgians  themselves, 
to  the  plane  of  a  national-anthem. 

Perhaps  I  have  given  you  the  impression 
that  the  Belgians  of  the  Sunny  Belgium  did 
not  love  their  country.  If  so,  I  have  erred. 
Nowhere,  as  the  terrible  test  has  proved,  was 
there  a  stronger  love  of  country.  But,  in 
quietness,  the  Belgian's  patriotism  was  quiet. 
He  did  not  dream  of  invasion ;  he  had  no  visions 
of  conquest.  To  raise  his  land  to  a  world- 
power  was  never  among  a  Belgian's  thoughts. 
His  national  pride  was  the  reverse  of  that;  it 
was  pride  in  the  contented  littleness  of  Bel- 
gium; his  national  ambition  was  to  show  the 
world  a  compact,  self-sufficient  state  whose 
glory  was  her  peace. 

Have  I  wandered  from  my  talk  about  the 
physical  characteristics  of  the  Belgium  and  the 
Belgians  that  I  used  to  know?  My  excuse  is 
that  those  characteristics  reflected  themselves 
in  the  mental  concepts  of  the  people:  Bel- 
gium was  quiet  and  peaceful,  because  Belgium 
was  merry  and  clean. 


22         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Belgian  cleanliness,  orderliness:  I  wonder 
if  ever  there  were  elsewhere  their  like.  The 
sort  of  people  that  have  a  fondness  for  the  word 
"quaint"  used  to  apply  it  to  the  Belgians,  who 
merited  it  because  they  had  attitude  without 
pose,  because  they  seized  fast  hold  of  every- 
thing modern  and  used  it  with  the  simple  prac- 
ticality that  all  other  modern  peoples  have  lost. 
Over  on  the  Isle  of  Marken,  the  mother,  already 
half  out  of  her  Amsterdam  clothes,  screams  to 
her  daughter:  "Another  tourist-boat  is  com- 
ing ;  hurry  and  put  on  your  fishermaid-costume 
— het  te  laat  is!"  And  the  dutiful  girl  strips 
herself  of  the  latest  fashions  and  prepares  to 
attract  twentieth-century  money  by  donning 
eighteenth-century  draperies.  The  Belgians 
learned  nothing  of  that  from  their  Dutch 
cousins:  they  were  themselves,  in  season  and 
out  of  it.  Nor  did  they  import  from  southern 
Italy  an  association  of  ideas  between  the  dirt 
of  the  present  and  the  monuments  of  the  past ; 
in  the  Belgium  that  smiled,  age  did  not  necessi- 
tate uncleanliness,  nor  did  godliness  and  the 
worship  of  God. 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM  2$ 

"You  can  eat  from  the  cobble-stones  of  Ant- 
werp/' a  Belgian  used  to  say  to  me,  "as  safely 
as  from  a  plate  in  London." 

Eat  well  you  certainly  could,  anywhere  in 
Belgium.  Americans  generally  called  Belgian 
cookery  greasy;  but  that  was  because  they  did 
not  know  where  to  go  for  the  really  Belgian 
food.  There  were  hundreds  of  wayside-inns 
where  two-francs-fifty  bought  a  dejeuner  such 
as  no  ingenunity  can  discover  and  no  money 
purchase  in  New  York;  and  of  the  cities  Ar- 
nold Bennett  was  right  when  he  said  !  that  the 
dinners  of  Brussels  surpassed  all  others  in  the 
world;  nowhere  could  one — and,  better,  two — 
dine  so  delicately  well  as  at  the  "Filet  de  Sole" 
in  the  rue  Gretry,  at  the  "Lion  d'Or"  in  the 
same  street — at  any  of  the  right  restaurants  in 
Brussels. 

In  the  largest  city  and  the  smallest  hamlet 
there  was  a  deal  of  excellent  thought  given  to 
f«>od  and  drink — not  to  absinthe  or  whisky,  for 
of  drunkenness  there  was  comparatively  little, 
but  to  the  lighter  wines  and  the  local  beers  of 
»"Your  United  States."    (Harper  &  Bros.) 


24         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

the  estaminets:  the  bitter  U it  set  of  Ghent,  the 
sugared  Witbeer  of  Louvain ;  the  Faro  and  the 
Brum,  and  the  twenty  years'  old  Gneuse  Lam- 
bic.  Food  and  drink,  so  right  that  none 
wanted  too  much  of  either,  and  dancing,  too, 
and  music.  Not  alone  the  grand  operas  of 
Brussels;  for  everywhere,  after  work,  the  peo- 
ple played.  Why,  once,  in  Bruges,  I  counted 
three  cafes  chant  ants  on  one  side  of  the  Groote 
Markt  facing  the  monument  to  Jan  Breidel  and 
Pieter  de  Conine  and  looking  over  to  the  old 
Tour  des  Halles.  The  thirteenth-century  tur- 
rets of  that  Belfry  echoed  back  a  quite  passa- 
ble imitation  of  a  song  from  "High  Jinks," 
which  I  had  last  heard  in  the  Casino  on  Broad- 
way, and  when  the  singer  had  obeyed  the  sum- 
mons of  the  encore,  she  sat  down  at  a  table 
and  completed,  by  the  addition  of  her  brother- 
er's  overcoat,  the  well-intentioned  beginning 
made  by  an  abortive  skirt.  Yet  the  next  day 
Bruges  was  another  city :  the  tongues  of  a  hun- 
dred bells  called  a  pious  population  to  church. 
There  was  the  hum  of  Sunday  silks  and  the 
scent  of  Sunday  soaps.     Round-faced  Flem- 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM         25 

ings,  with  round-faced  sons  and  daughters, 
marched  to  their  churches  and,  in  the  after- 
noon, walked  beside  their  sleepy,  tree-shaded 
canals;  and  I  remember  my  own  walk  on  one 
of  those  Sundays,  to  the  quietest,  most  peace- 
ful place  in  the  world :  a  square  of  green  sward 
and  drooping  elms  shut  in  by  the  old  church  of 
Ste.  Elizabeth  and  the  spick-and-span  white- 
washed houses  of  the  sisters  of  the  Bcguinage. 
I  have  done  a  little  walking  in  the  Belgian  coun- 
tryside, too,  and  come  to  many  a  tiny  inn  by 
night :  the  first  warning  that  the  inn  was  near 
was  always  music. 

This  can  be  no  attempt  at  a  guide  to  Bel- 
gium :  too  many  Americans  knew  it  well  in  the 
days  of  its  sunshine,  and  of  those  Americans 
one  at  least  has  not  the  heart  to  write  at  length 
of  smiles  that  have  since  given  way  to  tears 
so  very  bitter.  The  green  countryside  where 
men  tilled  the  earth  and  loved  it — men  that 
spoke  the  French  of  the  northwest,  men  that 
spoke  the  Romanic  Walloon  tongue,  and  men 
that  spoke  the  Flemish  which  the  Duke  of  Alva 
once  made  a  secret  language — none  that  saw  it 


\JQ 


26         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

can  forget  its  warm  charm.  The  delight  of 
the  dunes  about  Knocke;  the  innocent  gayety 
of  Heyst,  with  its  laughing  women  that  none 
ever  thought  would  sob,  and  its  brilliant  pink- 
and-orange  soldiers  that  none  ever  guessed 
could  fight;  its  promenade  a  mile  long  and 
twenty-odd  yards  across ;  its  romping  children 
and  its  military-bands  forever  playing  seren- 
ades :  who  that  has  been  there  does  not  remem- 
ber them?  In  every  traveler's  mind  there 
must  remain  these  pictures:  the  university 
at  Louvain,  which,  on  the  day  when  Colum- 
bus sailed  from  Palos,  was  beginning  to  won- 
der whether  the  world  were  round ;  Ghent's  St. 
Bavon  and  her  docks  where,  only  a  year  ago, 
ships  traded  in  cargoes  of  flowers;  Antwerp's 
busy  streets  about  her  Gothic  cathedral  and 
colonnaded  Hotel  de  Ville;  the  gayety  of  Brus- 
sels; the  smiling  quiet  of  ancient  Bruges. 

About  their  canvases  in  a  hundred  churches 
flitted  the  happy  ghosts  of  Hans  Memling  and 
Peter  Paul  Rubens,  of  the  two  David  Teniers 
and  Roger  van  der  Weyden,  of  the  three 
Brueghels  and  the  two  Van  Eycks.     Proud  of 


TIB 


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OS 

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_     _„, 


SUNSHINE  IN  BELGIUM         27 

the  peace  that  their  hard  struggles  had  at  last 
secured,  the  spirits  of  Belgium's  long  catalogue 
of  heroes  must  have  gathered  now  and  then  in 
many  a  gray  keep  and  on  many  a  disused  tower. 
In  the  quiet  sunshine  of  a  thousand  fertile 
fields,  among  the  whirring  machinery  of  count- 
less prospering  factories,  their  descendants, 
reared  to  kindness  and  bred  to  comfort,  went 
their  busy  ways  by  day  and  made  their  simple 
merriment  by  night.  Contented,  useful,  indus- 
trious, generous:  smiling  Belgium  was  all  of 
these. 

She  had  the  memory  of  a  splendid  past,  the 
certainty  of  an  honorable  present,  the  promise 
of  a  warless  future — the  country  of  sunshine. 


II 

STORM 

If  "War  is  Hell" — and  none  can  doubt  it  now 
— then,  when  I  returned  to  Belgium  in  August 
last,  I  came  to  the  back  door  of  Tophet — and 
the  door  was  wide  open.  I  passed  at  Ostend 
the  night  of  that  day  on  which  the  German 
army  occupied  Brussels  and  was  said  to  be 
throwing  out  its  advance-line  toward  Ghent. 

I  had  known  Ostend  more  or  less  intimately 
for  four  or  five  years.  Only  a  few  months  be- 
fore its  great  change,  I  had  answered  one  of 
its  smiling  good-byes — the  seductive  "au  re- 
voir"  of  a  town  that  was  then  one  of  the  six 
gayest  and  most  fashionable  seaside  resorts  in 
the  world.  There,  set  beautifully  in  the  midst 
of  a  countryside  both  industrial  and  agricul- 
tural, was  a  city  of  pleasure,  with  a  winter 
population    of    about    forty-three    thousand, 

which  the  first  months  of  summer  never  failed 

28 


STORM  29 

to  raise  to  eight  hundred  and  seventy-five  thou- 
sand. Then  the  crowds  came  there  to  be 
happy ;  now — 

But  let  me  first  recall  it  as  it  used  to  be: 

y 

From  nine  o'clock  in  the  morning  until  five 
o'clock  at  night,  the  broad  beach  is  alive  with 
laughing  men  and  pretty  women  in  those  scanty 
bathing-suits  that  inevitably  accompany  the 
modesty  of  bathing-machines.  The  Digue, 
that  great  stone  dyke,  often  thirty-five  feet 
wide,  which  runs  along  the  three  miles  of  coast 
to  Mariakirke,  is  lined  with  grandiose  hotels 
and  flamboyant  private  villas,  and  is  packed  by 
idlers  who  have  come  here  to  spend  money  ac- 
cumulated in  every  coinage  of  the  two  hemi- 
spheres. Military  bands  are  playing  Viennese 
waltzes;  love  is  being  made  in  ten  languages. 
Six  thousand  persons  are  seated  in  the  Kur- 
saal's  concert-hall,  six  hundred  are  dancing  in 
its  ballroom;  to  its  gaming-salon  have  come 
gamblers  from  over  three-quarters  of  the 
earth.  And  all  the  while  the  sturdy  little 
trains  are  steaming  into  the  Station  d'(  )stende- 
ville,  and  the  sturdy  little  boats  are  chugging 


30         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

up  to  Ostende-quai,  disgorging  more  bathers, 
lovers,  dancers,  gamesters:  belles  of  the  Paris 
boulevards,  beaux  of  Unter  den  Linden  and  the 
Ringstrasse,  brokers  from  Wall  Street,  invalids 
from  St.  Petersburg,  card  sharps  from  London. 

All  that  has  ended.  When  last  I  left  Ostend 
in  the  dawn  of  an  August  morning,  it  looked  as 
the  Lake  Front  of  Chicago  must  have  looked 
during  the  Great  Fire.  When  I  recall  this 
later  picture,  I  know  that  nowhere  have  I  ever 
had  so  poignantly  brought  home  to  me  the  dire 
completeness  with  which  a  week  of  war  can 
wipe  out  a  century  of  peace. 

For,  in  this  later  picture,  the  city  is  still 
overcrowded,  but  not  with  merrymakers;  the 
beach  is  still  alive,  but  not  with  laughter.  The 
hotels  are  closed,  the  villas  shuttered,  the  bands 
silenced,  the  idlers  called  away.  The  feet  that 
danced  have  fled;  where  the  gambler  clinked 
his  coins  there  rattle  the  bones  of  poverty;  on 
those  yellow  sands  where  lovers  so  lately  whis- 
pered, fear  elbows  fear.  The  trains  bring 
soldiers;  the  highways  pour  in  refugees;  most 


STORM  31 

of  the  boats,  except  those  used  for  govern- 
mental purposes,  have  ceased  to  run. 

Those  women  of  the  boulevards  have  re- 
turned to  a  stern  and  saddened  Paris;  those 
beaux  of  Berlin  and  Vienna  are  bearing  death 
and  destitution  to  Belgium  or  facing  bullets  on 
the  Danube ;  the  Wall  Street  broker  is  in  Liver- 
pool, vainly  trying  to  draw  against  his  now 
valueless  letter-of-credit  for  a  steerage-passage 
home;  the  Russian  invalids  are  being  hurried 
across  Denmark,  and  the  London  plunger  has 
gone  back  to  an  England  that  clamors  for  more 
and  more  men  to  send  to  the  front.  Its  guests 
departed,  its  industries  discontinued,  its  port 
empty,  Ostend  the  garish  has  become  a  city  of 
Dreadful  Night;  is  little  better  than  it  was  in 
1604,  when,  with  the  French  and  English,  as 
now,  its  allies,  it  capitulated,  after  a  three- 
years  siege,  to  Ambrogio  di  Spinola,  the 
Genoese. 

Our  boat,  on  which  I  may  as  well  at  once 
say  that  I  had  no  business  to  be,  had  lurched 
through  the  earlier  darkness  without  a  light 


Z2         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

showing.  To  me,  standing  well  forward  on 
the  spray-soaked  deck,  it  seemed  that  we  could 
not  yet  be  anywhere  near  shore:  we  were  but 
a  black  thing  pitching  desperately  about  limit- 
less black  space — when  suddenly  we  were 
drenched  in  a  hideous  blue  radiance. 

I  can  give  you  no  idea  of  the  shock  except 
to  say  that  it  must  have  been  much  as  it  would 
be  for  a  blind  man  were  he  to  regain  his  sight 
at  an  instant  when  his  unexpected  eyes  were 
fixed  on  the  noonday  sun.  Under  it,  we  were 
worse  than  blind.  I  believe  that  there  was  no 
one  on  board  who  did  not  stagger  from  this 
sudden  effulgence  as  though  from  a  blow  in 
the  face.  It  was  war-time  Ostend's  combined 
military  searchlights  accurately  spying  us  out, 
plucking  us  from  our  secret  darkness  with  a 
long  arm  of  illumination  that  made  our  ap- 
proach more  public  than  an  approach  at  two 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon. 

There  were  sharp  orders — megaphonic  cries 
out  of  the  night — there  was  the  clank  of  ma- 
chinery. Our  engines  jolted,  stopped;  chains 
rattled;  a  whirling  boat  jumped  alongside,  and 


STORM  33 

an  officer  and  six  soldiers  swarmed,  like  so 
many  rats,  over  the  dipping  rail. 

That  officer,  when  he  had  satisfied  himself 
of  our  captain,  came  upon  me.  I  had  a  camera 
and  a  pair  of  field-glasses  slung  across  my 
shoulders.  He  turned  a  pocket  flashlamp  on 
my  passport,  marked  it,  returned  it  and  said: 

"It  is  necessary  that  you  surrender  this 
camera.''  He  spoke  the  thick  French  of  a 
Fleming.  "When  you  leave  the  port  to  return 
to  England,  it  will  he  given  hack  to  you;  but 
now  not  to  surrender  it  is  to  be  arrested." 

I  was  not  yet  used  to  war:  I  said  I  was  an 
American  citizen,  and — 

"It  is  necessary  that  you  surrender  this 
camera,"  he  interrupted  me  by  repeating. 
"When  you  leave  this  port  to  return  to  Eng- 
land, it  will  be  given  back  to  you ;  but  now  not 
to  surrender  it  is  to  be  arrested." 

I  was  not  arrested. 

When  he  had  possessed  himself  of  my  cam- 
era, he  asked : 

"Are  you  a  journalist?" 

T  told  him  no ;  for  when  I  entered  newspaper 


34         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

work,  eighteen  years  ago,  the  head  copyreader 
assured  me  that  I  should  never  become  one. 
Besides,  the  English  newspapers  had  flung 
broadcast  the  information  that  all  correspond- 
ents in  Belgium  not  citizens  of  one  of  the  allied 
powers  would  be  shot.  Everything  considered, 
I  held  it  best  to  account  for  my  presence  at 
Ostend  in  another  way;  so  I  said  that  I  was  an 
American  tourist  and  added  what  appeared  to 
me  to  be  an  adequate  reason  for  such  a  person 
to  be  at  such  a  place  on  such  an  occasion :  long 
experience  had  shown  me  that  Europeans  con- 
sider all  American  tourists  a  little  crazy,  and 
I  wanted  every  allowance  possible  made  for 
me. 

Then  the  officer  looked  at  my  binoculars  and 
saw  that  they  were  of  German  manufacture. 
I  had  to  produce  my  passport  again  and  ex- 
plain that  I  had  bought  my  glasses  in  New 
Orleans.  .  .  . 

Ostend,  when  they  finally  permitted  me 
ashore,  was  less  familiar  to  me  than  when  I 
visited  it  for  the  first  time.  That  first  time, 
I  knew  it  by  pictures  and  guide-books;  later, 


STORM  35 

as  I  have  said,  I  came  to  know  it  well  from 
many  visits  there;  now  I  could  scarcely  find  my 
way  about  in  it.  The  very  streets  seemed  to 
have  shifted  their  positions:  it  was  a  night- 
mare-town. 

Picture  to  yourself  Atlantic  City  in  mid- 
season — its  gayety  stopped  as  by  a  single  shot; 
its  visitors  fled  in  fright;  its  accustomed  life 
brought  to  a  standstill,  sudden  and  complete. 
Imagine  the  bulk  of  its  male  citizens,  as  its 
music  ceased  in  the  middle  of  a  bar,  whisked 
away  to  battle.  Imagine  military  rule  then  as 
suddenly  substituted  for  civil  law — the  banks 
closed;  food-prices  mounting;  the  electric  cars 
with  women  conductors,  and  old  men  in  the 
drivers'  places ;  no  boats  in  the  Inlet ;  no  rolling- 
chairs,  no  ponies,  no  bathers  in  view ;  the  hotels 
shut  tight;  sentinels  at  the  corners;  Philadel- 
phia captured  by  an  advancing  enemy ;  Camden 
occupied ;  a  wing  of  the  invaders  creeping  upon 
Manhattan;  a  line  of  flaming  battle  all  along 
the  Pennsylvania  boundary  to  the  New  York 
State  line;  and  the  hostile  forces,  with  death  in 
their  hands,  coming  nearer — nearer — over  the 


36         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

flatlands,  perhaps  through  the  water,  now  and 
then  visibly  through  the  clouds  of  the  air. 
Pour  into  that  Atlantic  City,  thus  disorgan- 

v 

ized,  stunned,  panic-smitten,  three  times  its  ac- 
customed population,  in  the  shape  of  all  the 
country-folk  from  the  Delaware  River  on  the 
west  and  from  all  the  nearby  towns  to  the 
south  and  north.  Fill  the  Pennsylvania  Rail- 
road Station  with  them;  fill  the  Reading  Rail- 
way Station;  crowd  them  along  all  the  pave- 
ments of  all  the  streets,  up  the  Boardwalk  and 
down ;  toss  them  on  to  the  beach — women,  chil- 
dren and  old  men,  some  wounded,  more  ill,  all 
robbed  of  their  material  possessions,  and  many 
of  them  robbed  of  the  lives  of  those  they  loved 
best  on  earth. 

Do  this,  and  you  have  Ostend  as  I  saw  it. 

It  was  a  town  of  wandering  and  frightened 
ghosts  unable  to  give  any  reason  for  the  start 
of  that  horror  which  had  overtaken  them — a 
town  full  of  those  who  mourned  their  dead  and 
themselves  expected  at  any  hour  to  die. 

Ostend  faces  the  North  Sea — a  body  of 
water  that  has  not  yet  had  its  bloody  rebaptism 


STORM  37 

as  the  German  Ocean — with  the  canal  running 
at  right  angles  on  the  east.  Our  hoat  had 
come  up  this  latter,  and  I  landed  at  the 
Station  Maritime.  That  brought  me  well  to 
the  back  of  the  city,  to  reach  the  center  of 
which  I  had  to  cross  a  drawbridge  to  the  Quai 
de  l'Empcreur  and  so  make  my  way  past  the 
Church  of  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul  to  the  wide 
rue  de  la  Chapelle  and  the  town-hall. 

No  sooner  had  I  come  to  the  plaza  on  which 
stands  the  big,  twin-towered  church  than  I  was 
in  the  midst  of  the  refugees;  and  from  that 
moment,  wherever  I  went  about  the  town,  I 
remained  surrounded  by  them.  I  was  caught 
in  a  troubled,  forward-trudging,  endless  tide, 
making  northward — rustics  in  all  the  pictur- 
esque costumes  of  their  respective  country- 
sides; women  with  babies  at  their  breasts; 
toddling  children  crying  and  tugging  at  their 
mothers'  skirts  or  their  grandfathers'  jackets; 
white-haired  men  bent  double  with  age;  girls 
with  swollen  eyes  and  boys  with  lips  com- 
pressed;  the  lame,  the  blind  and  the  deformed. 

I  saw  one  young  woman  in  a  bedraggled 


38         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

wedding-dress,  the  veil  hanging  in  tatters 
down  her  back  to  her  heels,  her  hair  flying,  a 
veritable  Ophelia.  They  told  me  that  her 
fiance  had  been  called  to  the  front  on  the  day 
preceding  that  set  for  her  wedding:  she  had 
become  insane  and  insisted  on  wearing  her 
marriage  costume  when  she  fled  with  her 
mother  from  the  oncoming  Germans. 

I  saw  two  tottering  graybeards  with  crepe 
rosettes  on  their  hats,  and  they  explained  to 
me  that  they  had  been  mourners  at  a  funeral 
in  their  village  when,  with  a  clattering  of  hoofs 
and  a  rattle  of  shots,  an  advance  party  of 
Uhlans  suddenly  appeared:  the  coffin  was 
dumped  into  its  grave;  the  service  ended  in  a 
sentence;  the  entire  funeral  party  took  to  its 
heels. 

The  majority  of  these  fugitives  were  in  their 
bright  holiday  clothes,  the  pretty  fete-garb  that 
artists  have  for  centuries  celebrated,  that  cam- 
era-bearing tourists  have  for  years  "snapped," 
and  that  the  omnipresent  picture-postcard  has 
everywhere  familiarized.  I  asked  why  this 
was  so. 


STORM  39 

"Because,"  was  always  the  answer,  "they 
are  the  best  we  have,  these  clothes.  This 
was  the  easiest  way  to  carry  them,  and  we 
did  not   want  to  leave   them  behind   for   the 


>> 


enemy. 

It  is  difficult  to  convey  by  merely  written 
words  the  horror  of  these  flight-soiled  and 
dust-stained  gala  garments  in  that  night  of 
terror  and  of  death. 

Every  human  being  at  all  able  to  carry  any- 
thing carried  some  bundle,  always  heavier  than 
the  weakness  of  its  bearer  should  have  had  to 
endure,  filled  with  such  household  treasures 
— old  heirlooms,  convertible  property,  or  pa- 
thetic keepsakes — as  could  be  snatched  in  the 
first  high  heat  of  flight.  One  woman  of  sev- 
enty had  a  bulging  cotton  handkerchief  tied  to 
her  shrunken  waist:  it  was  stuffed  with  the 
silver  buttons  cut  from  the  clothes  of  her  long 
dead  parents — "the  happier  for  being  dead," 
said  she — and  from  those  of  her  husband  and 
50ns,  now  somewhere  on  the  firing-line.  Here 
Uld  there  a  bearer  stumbled  or  was  jostled  by 
:i  companion,  and  her  bundle  fell  to  the  paw- 


40         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

ment  and  burst  open,  belching  its  poor  contents 
into  the  dirty  street. 

Along  the  curb  fugitives,  fainting  from 
wounds  or  worn  out  from  exertion,  would  fall 
or  sink  to  the  ground,  and  lie  or  sit  there  inert, 
spent,  until  a  soldier  would  shoulder  his  way 
through  the  press  and  rouse  the  weary  or  carry 
off  the  ill.  Some  were  bleeding,  more  were 
bandaged,  nearly  all  were  footsore. 

The  streets  were  only  partially  lighted — the 
streets  of  that  Ostend  which  the  Belgians  used 
to  call  their  "White  City."  Every  few  paces, 
his  bayonet  fixed  to  his  musket,  an  infantry- 
man stood  on  guard.  Hussars  rode  by,  scat- 
tering the  throngs  that  filled  every  thorough- 
fare— throngs,  as  I  should  earlier  have  noted, 
uncannily  silent.  The  market-place,  the  Pare 
Leopold,  and  the  whole  outdoors  of  the  town, 
from  the  sea  to  the  rue  du  Claire,  and  from 
the  canal  to  the  avenue  de  la  Reine,  were  full 
of  these  Belgian  villagers,  disqualified  by  age 
or  sex  or  infirmities  from  fighting  and  driven 
out  of  their  homes  by  the  German  invasion  of 


STORM  41 

a  land  whose  neutrality  the  German  had  sworn 
to  respect. 

The  beach  was  packed  with  bivouacking 
refugees;  whole  families,  less  their  military- 
members,  were  huddled  about  the  piles  of  bun- 
dles that  they  had  flung  together  in  their 
Flemish  hamlets  before  running  from  those 
cottages  which  had  housed  their  ancestors  for 
generations  and  leaving  them  to  destruction. 
On  the  paved  streets,  the  newcomers,  though 
they  rarely  spoke,  made  a  deafening  tattoo 
with  their  wooden  shoes,  and  in  every  open 
space  they  heaped  their  hampers,  trussed 
belongings  and  hodge-podge  salvage.  Still 
others,  mixed  with  a  sprinkling  of  wounded 
soldiers,  flooded  the  railway  station,  sat  on  de- 
crepit trunks  and  handbags,  sprawled  sick  or 
sleeping  on  the  floor.  And  finally,  from  along 
the  seacoast  and  by  every  highway  and  bypath 
that  leads  from  the  southeast,  trudged  and 
straggled  in  the  vast  majority:  those  peasants 
who  had  been  unable  to  find  standing-room 
in  the  cars  or  money  to  pay  for  it. 


42         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

"Where  do  you  expect  to  go?" — Again  and 
again  I  asked  that  question. 

Nobody  knew. 

"What  do  you  expect  to  do?" 

The  answer  was  always  the  same :  a  helpless 
gesture  with  the  eloquently  opened  hands. 

None  appeared  to  have  considered  his  ulti- 
mate destination,  or  seemed  much  to  care,  so 
long  as  that  destination  was  somewhere  away 
from  the  Germans  and  somewhere  near  the  sea 
No  provision,  so  far  as  I  could  learn,  had  as 
yet  been  made  by  the  municipal  authorities  to 
feed  or  house  these  seekers  for  the  city's  pro- 
tection; of  individual  charity  there  was  a  great 
deal,  much  of  it  touching;  but  of  organized 
charity  there  was  then  no  visible  sign.  Yer. 
everybody  was  sure  that  the  invaders  would 
come  in,  out  of  their  prescribed  way,  to  the 
sea-front:  with  the  agrarian's  faith  in  stone 
walls,  everybody  trusted  to  this  town  for  shel- 
ter; their  single  object  was  to  get  as  far  away 
from  the  hostile  army  as  possible  and  to  re- 
main there  as  long  as  might  be. 

Rumor,  of  course,  was  rampant  and  gen- 


'  '  ■  wood,  New  ) 

HERE  Av,\',    PKOM    im.  GERM  i   SOMEWHERE   Nl  \i< 

i  mi:  Si  \" 


STORM  43 

erally  unfounded:  the  Germans  had  set  fire  to 
Ghent;  a  party  of  Uhlans  had  reached  Bruges 
and  blown  up  its  famous  bell-tower ;  the  burgo- 
master of  Alost  had  been  hanged  from  a  lamp- 
post. And  the  odd  thing  was — the  odd  thing 
and,  in  at  least  one  fine  sense,  the  splendid 
thing — that  they  had  more  to  say,  these  peas- 
ants, of  the  wrong  done  their  country  than  of 
the  horrors  wrought  upon  themselves.  Per- 
haps they  had  been  too  severely  stunned  by 
their  individual  misfortunes  to  be  ready  at 
once  to  speak  of  them;  perhaps  those  injuries 
were  too  deep  for  immediate  discussion:  that 
would  be  the  cynic's,  and  it  might  be  the  right, 
explanation.  For  my  own  part,  I  like  to  think 
otherwise,  and  my  acquaintance  with  the  Bel- 
gian character  supports  me.  In  any  case,  the 
fact  remains  that  every  refugee  whom  I  talked 
with  during  that  panic-night — and  I  talked 
with  scores — spoke  first  of  his  country  and 
spoke  only  under  pressure  of  himself.  It  was 
not  that  the  fugitives  resented  the  inquiries  of 
a  stranger;  on  the  contrary,  they  seemed  par- 
ticularly  anxious  to  dlSCUSS   the   violation  of 


44         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Belgian  neutrality  with  any  one  having  the 
smallest  chance  of  reaching  the  American  pub- 
lic's ear :  the  truth,  I  am  convinced,  was  higher 
than  casually  appears.  These  wanderers  had 
been  despoiled  of  everything  save  what  they 
carried  in  their  arms  and  on  their  backs ;  they 
had  nothing — absolutely  nothing — besides ; 
sons,  fathers,  brothers  had  been  slaughtered; 
daughters,  mothers,  sisters  had  been  ravished ; 
penury  was  upon  them,  starvation  scarce  a  day 
beyond ;  and  yet  their  chief  thought  was  of  their 
country. 

"But  what  have  we  done — what  has  the  lit- 
tle Belgium  done  ?"  That  was  ever  their  query 
of  the  unanswering  sky.  "Always  we  have 
considered  the  great  Germany  as  it  were  our 
big  brother  who  had  promised  to  protect  us, 
and  suddenly  it  bids  us  help  it  against  our  own 
pledge  to  another  neighbor,  and  when  we  pro- 
test, it  burns  not  only  our  forts,  but  our  houses ; 
it  kills  not  only  our  soldiers,  but  our  women, 
our  old  men,  our  children!  Why?  We  can- 
not guess;  we  receive  no  reply  but  the  bullet. 
Why?" 


STORM  45 

One  different  note  I  heard.  It  was  sounded 
by  the  quavering  voice  of  an  octogenarian :  two 
days  before  he  had  been  the  owner  of  a  small 
house  and  garden  near  Auderghem,  on  the 
Termonde  road;  to-night  he  was  penniless  and 
starving. 

"Where  is  the  Belgian  cottager's  quarrel 
with  the  cottager  of  Germany?"  he  cried. 
"Does  it  matter  to  us  whether  Russia  and 
Servia  killed  that  Austrian  Grand  Duke,  or 
only  Servia  alone?  Are  our  crops  any  better 
or  any  surer  because  Germany  gains  a  seaport 
or  France  retakes  Alsace  and  Lorraine?  Not 
a  bit ;  but,  just  as  if  it  mattered  everything,  we 
must  die  for  it!" 

Later,  some  such  feeling  I  found  in  every 
one  of  them :  they  must  die  for  it ;  and  yet  they 
were  dying  without  any  more  complaint  than 
can  be  put  in  the  compass  of  a  few  questions — 
some  in  stolid  hatred;  some  stoically;  many 
with  gladness.  In  their  own  disillusioned  way, 
even  the  bitterest  were  splendidly  loyal.  It 
was  a  significant  fact  that,  among  all  those 
hundreds    of    the    dispossessed    and    fugitive, 


46         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

there  was  not  one  sound-bodied  man  of  fight- 
ing-age :  those  were  all  at  the  war. 

Women  and  children  and  old  men — every 
road  leading  away  from  the  German  advance 
must  have  been  stained  with  their  blood.  I 
talked  with  a  tottering  woman  of  twenty-five 
whose  husband  had  been  called  to  the  colors 
and  killed  in  the  first  day's  fighting  about 
Liege.  She  had  with  her  a  son  of  five,  who 
was  staggering  under  the  weight  of  his  eight- 
een-months-old  sister;  another  sister  carried  a 
basket  as  large  as  herself,  and  the  mother  had 
in  her  arms  an  infant  that  she  vowed  had  been 
born  to  her  on  the  roadside  only  thirty-six 
hours  before. 

"Have  you  no  relatives?"  I  asked  her. 

She  shook  her  head. 

"No  friends?" 

"They  are  dead  or  lost  since  the  day  before 
yesterday." 

"Then  what  will  you  do  ?"  I  helplessly  urged 
her. 

She  made  the  sign  of  the  cross. 

'What  the  good  God  wishes,"  she  said. 


tcy 


STORM  47 

A  few  yards  behind  her,  a  girl,  who  might 
have  been  eighteen  years  old,  was  lying  where 
she  had  fallen  a  minute  since.  She  was  beau- 
tiful, with  black  hair  and  creamy  skin;  and  her 
face,  illuminated  by  the  rays  of  a  lantern  in 
the  hand  of  a  passing  fugitive,  was  very  calm. 
A  wound,  some  one  explained,  had  reopened: 
a  wound  inflicted  by  a  stray  shot  some  days 
bince.  I  bent  over  to  speak  to  her:  she  was 
dead. 

Making  my  way  out  of  the  town,  I  stemmed 
the  human  tide  along  the  Bruges  Canal,  near 
Stalhillebrugge.  A  white-bearded  man  that  I 
passed  was  carrying  in  his  arms  a  black-haired 
little  girl  of  three  or  four  years,  sound  asleep. 

"Your  granddaughter?"  I  asked. 

No,  she  was  not  his  granddaughter. 

It  was  not  pleasant  to  persist  in  probing 
wounds  still  raw,  but  I  persisted: 

"Surely  not  your  daughter?" 

"No,"  he  said  simply.  'The  poor  little  one 
was  wandering  along  the  road  witli  the  rest  of 
us  and  said  her  mother  had  been  hurt  in  a 
cannonade  in  their  village — killed,  I  suppose. 


48         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

I  do  not  know  whose  child  she  is.  My  faith! 
There  are  many  such  in  these  bitter  days, 
monsieur." 

I  nearly  stumbled  over  two  youngsters, 
tramping  hand  in  hand — a  boy  and  a  girl,  the 
former  manfully  supporting  and  encouraging 
his  companion.  They  spoke  French  of  sorts, 
as  many  of  these  Fleming  peasants  seemed  to 
do;  and  I  found  that  they  were  brother  and 
sister,  aged  respectively  ten  and  eight. 

"And  yet  you  are  alone  in  this  crowd? 
Where  is  your  father  ?"  I  asked. 

The  boy's  answer  came  proudly : 

"My  father  is  one  of  our  little  soldiers.  He 
is  with  his  regiment.  By  now,  they  say,  he  is 
safe  in  one  of  the  Antwerp  forts:  they  will 
never  take  those  forts,  the  Germans." 

"And  your  mother?" 

The  little  girl  began  to  cry. 

"We  do  not  know,"  she  sobbed. 

The  boy  beckoned  me  aside. 

"It  is  not  good  that  my  sister  should  under- 
stand," he  whispered.  "While  she  was  at  the 
cottage  of  a  neighbor,  a  German  shell  struck 


STORM  49 

our  house.  It  tumbled  the  roof  down  on  us. 
My  mother  was  cookine.  A  beam  hit  her  and 
crushed  her  against  the  fireplace.  She  was 
killed.  Jeanne — that  is  my  sister's  name: 
Jeanne — I  have  not  told:  she  is  too  young  to 
be  told." 

I  could  multiply  these  instances  by  many 
gathered  during  that  one  night's  observations : 
but  to  what  purpose?  I  have  set  down  a  few, 
and  these  merely  to  give  a  hint  of  the  whole. 
Xor  have  I  selected  the  worst,  for  the  worst 
may  not  be  told.  No  victim  of  the  invader — 
I  repeat  it  because  it  seems  to  me  so  full  of 
meaning — was  eager  to  volunteer  his  testi- 
mony; there  was  none  of  the  volubility  of  the 
mendicant ;  none  of  the  whine  of  the  beggar,  the 
loquacity  of  him  who  wants  charity.  The  bar- 
est facts  were  all  that  were  mentioned,  and  these 
only  upon  a  repeated  questioning  not  willingly 
undertaken  on  my  part,  but  undertaken  in  a 
desire  to  learn  and  report  to  my  own  country 
a  little  of  the  tremendous  truth.  The  refugees 
in  Ostend  expected  nothing;  they  had  almost 
ceased  to  hope   for   anything;  they  had   lied 


50         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

from  their  ruined  homes  because  there  was 
nothing  left  for  them  to  live  upon,  because  they 
could  not  fight,  because  they  were  driven,  not 
so  much  by  fear  of  the  German  sword,  already 
red  with  the  blood  of  their  relatives  and  friends, 
as  by  the  blind  human  instinct  that  makes  for 
flight  when  fight  has  become  impossible.  They 
were  unimportant  people;  had  they  all  stayed 
in  their  homes  to  be  slain  there,  the  great  world 
would  not  have  missed  them,  would  have  got 
along  quite  comfortably ;  probably  not  a  dozen 
of  them  had  been  known  beyond  a  radius  of  ten 
miles  from  his  native  hamlet;  I  dare  say  they 
really  didn't  matter — but  they  were  uncom- 
monly like  you  and  me. 

One  other  detail  merits  mention  here :  Even 
in  those  early  days  of  the  war,  when  the  queer 
censorship  in  England  was  delighting  in  the 
full  exercise  of  its  power,  and  when  almost  no 
news  was  allowed  to  trickle  into  the  columns 
of  the  free  British  press — even  then  in  Eng- 
land, where  I  was  living,  we  had  begun  to  hear 
something  about  that  ill-treatment  accorded  by 
the  German  troops  to  non-combatants,  the  full 


STORM  51 

accounts  of  which  were  already  stirring 
America.  About  this  I  made  more  inquiries 
than  one. 

A  cripple,  whose  deformity  saved  him  from 
military  service,  said  that  he  had  been  in  a 
hamlet  near  Oreys  when  the  enemy  entered  it. 

"I  was  in  my  cousin's  cottage,"  he  said. 
''We  heard  the  noise  of  horses'  hoofs,  and  then 
the  smashing  of  doors  and  the  tinkle  of  glass 
from  breaking  windows.  German  soldiers 
came  into  the  room  in  which  we  were  sitting, 
so  quickly  that  we  had  not  yet  got  to  the  win- 
dow to  look  out  to  see  what  was  the  matter. 
That  was  the  way  always:  everything  hap- 
pened so  quickly  that  it  was  over  before  one 
could  understand  what  it  was  all  about.  .  .  . 
Those  soldiers  beat  me  and  the  women.  Why  ? 
I  don't  know  why.  When  my  cousin  protested 
— when  he  asked  them  why  they  did  it — they 
knocked  his  brains  out  with  their  rifle-butts 
before  his  old  wife's  eyes." 

I  had  heard  that  the  Germans  always  de- 
clared such  actions  to  be  reprisals  fur  resistance 
"ii  the  part  of  non-combatants;  but  in  Ostend  1 


52         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

was  told  only  one  story  that  could  at  all  sub- 
stantiate that  contention.     It  was  this : 

A  young  mother  said  that,  in  her  village,  the 
invaders  had  shot  several  private  citizens  and 
burned  their  houses,  but  not  without  first  ac- 
cusing the  victims  of  firing  on  the  passing 
soldiery. 

"Were  those  accusations  true?"  I  wondered. 

She  did  not  know.  There  had  been  firing 
from  some  of  the  other  houses;  but  whether 
or  not  from  those  subsequently  burned,  she 
could  not  be  sure.  Even  if  there  had  been 
offenses,  the  offenders  were  only  women  and 
children  and  old  men :  a  squad  of  a  half-dozen 
healthy  soldiers  could  have  ended  the  troubles 
by  a  few  arrests.  Her  neighbor,  a  woman  of 
her  own  age,  had  been  flogged  for  tossing  a  pot 
of  boiling  water  on  the  enemy's  troops;  and 
another,  a  friend,  was  treated  even  worse  when 
she  showed  herself  loath  to  furnish  food  to  the 
invaders. 

"But  what  would  you?"  asked  my  informant. 
"My  neighbor's  man  had  been  killed  by  them 


STORM  53 

at  Liege;  and  as  for  my  friend,  is  it  that  we 
should  feed  the  enemies  of  our  country?" 

Elsewhere  I  shall  tell  some  of  the  tales  that 
I  heard  of  deeds  done  against  the  defense- 
less and  the  unoffending.  Here  it  is  pleasant 
to  he  ahle  to  set  down  two  stories  of  a  different 
sort  : 

A  man  who  must  have  been  nearly  ninety, 
and  was  mounted  on  a  horse  correspondingly 
ancient,  said  that  the  animal  had  been  brought 
to  him  by  some  German  soldiers  when  he  told 
them  he  had  a  younger  brother  in  Ostend  who, 
could  he  but  reach  that  city,  would  care  for 
him ;  and  an  old  woman  showed  me  a  handful 
of  German  money — one  mark  and  two  mark 
pieces — which  she  said  a  Prussian  lieutenant 
had  given  her  to  facilitate  her  journey  to  her 
daughter's  Ostend  home.  Among  all  the  too- 
well  authenticated  tales  of  German  atrocities, 
it  is  good  to  place  these  two  stories  of  another 
sort.  I  wish  that  I  knew  the  names  of  those 
soldiers  and  that  lieutenant  and  could  record 
them  here. 


54         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

One  other  word  I  should  say  here  and  now, 
and  that  has  to  do  with  the  Germans  as  marks- 
men. My  previous  observation  of  target- 
practice  in  the  German  army  had  given  me  a 
low  opinion  of  these  men  as  rifle-shots;  and, 
since  the  first  days  of  the  war,  the  American, 
French  and  English  newspapers  united  in  the 
declaration  that  the  contest  showed  the  Ger- 
man infantryman  to  be  a  poor  hand  with  a  gun. 
That  opinion,  I  am  told,  still  obtains  in  this 
country :  so  far  as  I  am  concerned,  it  was  con- 
troverted during  this  visit  to  Ostend  and  has 
never  since  been  reestablished. 

There,  among  all  the  soldiers  and  fugitives 
that  I  talked  with,  every  word  of  testimony 
belied  the  current  rumor.  I  heard,  indeed, 
some  remarkable  tales  of  German  shooting 
skill,  and  nearly  every  wounded  soldier  that  I 
saw  had  been  hit  in  either  the  head  or  chest. 
Moreover,  I  am  bound  to  add  that  the  wounds 
were  clean :  the  bullets  that  made  them  had  not 
been  flattened  and  were  not  "soft-nosed." 
Signs  of  wrong  were  plentiful  enough,  and 
some  of  them  must  be  told  in  another  chapter ; 


STORM  55 

but  I  discovered  no  proof  that  the  use  of  the 
dum-dum  was  among  the  crimes  committed  by 
the  Germans  in  Belgium. 

I  walked  some  miles  in  the  general  direction 
followed  by  the  Bruges  Canal,  dodging  sen- 
tries without  difficulty,  and  stopping  to  talk 
with  scores  of  refugees.  I  was  going  along 
a  track  that,  in  times  of  peace,  is  a  highway  of 
industry;  but  so  far  as  the  night  would  let  me 
judge,  that  industry  has  been  hopelessly  crip- 
pled. 

Every  citizen  of  Ostend  whom  I  spoke 
with  substantiated  this  impression.  Mills  are 
empty,  factories  silent ;  the  crops  rot  in  the 
fields;  commerce  is  dead.  It  is  as  if  some 
enormous  and  final  blight  had  settled  upon  the 
entire  countryside.  It  is  a  situation  that,  if 
brought  about  by  flood  or  plague,  would  cause 
meetings  for  succor  and  open  subscription-lists 
for  assistance  in  every  country  throughout  the 
civilized — or  once  civilized — world.  It  means 
poverty  and  death — it  has  already  brought 
poverty  and  death — to  thousands  of  people 
who  have  never  seen  more  than  the  maps  of 


56         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Germany,  of  Austria,  of  Turkey:  it  is  the 
seamy  side  of  the  glorious  coat  of  War.  .  .  . 

I  turned  about  and  joined  the  army  of  fugi- 
tives, falling  into  slow  step  between  a  woman 
nursing  her  baby  and  her  grandfather  nursing 
a  bullet-shattered  arm.  The  wayside  was 
cluttered  with  debris:  peasants  had  tried  to 
carry  away  only  what  was  of  some  little  value 
among  their  scant  possessions,  and  had  found 
that  little  too  much,  and  flung  it  aside;  and 
other  peasants  were  too  heavily  laden  to  assist 
or  rob.  Some  women  had  stretched  them- 
selves beside  their  poor  treasures  and  fallen 
asleep  with  those  treasures  for  pillows.  A 
few  were  praying.  Others  were  crying  softly 
from  wounds,  illness  and  hunger. 

It  was  good  to  come  again  to  the  Station 
Maritime — and  to  my  scrupulously-returned 
camera.  It  was  better  to  feel  the  engines 
chugging  under  my  feet  and,  in  the  red  dawn, 
the  spray  of  the  familiar  and  unchanged  North 
Sea  on  my  face. 

I  did  not  want  to  look  back,  but  I  had  to  look 
back.     As  we  pulled  out  into  the  open  water, 


STORM  57 

I  fancied  I  could  still  see  that  haggard,  silent 
tide  of  peasants  in  their  ruined  festival  clothes, 
with  their  only  remaining  possessions  in  those 
heavy  bundles — old  men,  cripples,  women  and 
children:  the  chaff  of  war,  ill,  starving,  de- 
spoiled. Overhead  there  soared  what  looked 
like  a  sinister  bird  of  prey,  surviving  from 
some  wild  antediluvian  era. 

"That's  a  German  aeroplane,"  said  the  mate, 
who  stood  beside  me.  "A  taubc,  that's  wot 
its  name  is:  a  dove,  you  know,  sir.  Dove  o' 
peace!  Wot?"  He  spat  into  the  blue  water, 
then  returned  his  now  reflective  gaze  to  that 
monster  of  the  sky.  'They  tell  me,"  he  pres- 
ently resumed,  "that  it's  costing,  in  pay,  ammu- 
nition and  food,  four  million  four  hundred 
thousand  pounds  a  day  to  run  this  war,  and 
the  half  o'  that  comes  out  o'  Germany." 

For  the  Germans'  pay,  ammunition  and  food 
— for  their  soldiers,  in  other  words — almost 
eleven  million  dollars  a  day  to  wipe  the  very 
name  of  Belgium  from  the  map  of  Europe. 
How  much,  among  the  Germans  themselves,  in 
spoiled    industry    and    commerce — in    human 


58         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

blood  and  human  life,  off  as  well  as  on  the  fir- 
ing-line— in  the  heartbreak  of  German  women 
and  the  ruin  of  German  children  ?  How  much 
in  shattered  ideals — in  the  setback  to  civiliza- 
tion— in  the  reawakening  of  the  savage,  who 
sleeps,  at  best  of  times,  so  lightly  in  us  all? 
Belgium?  For  a  while,  at  least,  they  have 
succeeded  there;  they  have  indeed  obliterated 
her.  But  the  hand  that  wiped  her  from  the 
map  of  Europe  has  engraved  her  on  the  hearts 
of  men. 


I 


Ill 

WEATHER-SIGNALS 

What  brought  about  so  terrible  a  change  upon 
the  once  smiling  face  of  Belgium?  This  and 
all  it  stands  for: 


Extract  from  a  Proclamation  to  the  Municipal 
Authorities  of  the  City  of  Liege. 

August  22,  1914. 
The  inhabitants  of  the  town  of  Andenne,  after 
having  declared  their  peaceful  intentions,  have 
made  a  surprise  attack  on  our  troops. 

It  is  with  my  consent  that  the  Commander-in- 
Chief  has  ordered  the  whole  town  to  be  burned 
and  that  about  one  hundred  people  have  been 
shot. 

I  bring  this  fact  to  the  knowledge  of  the  city 
of  Liege,  so  that  citizens  of  Liege  may  realize 
the  fate  with  which  they  are  menaced  if  they 
adopt  a  similar  attitude. 

The  General  Commanding  in  Chief, 
(Signed)     Von  Bulow. 


That  quotation  is  no  manufactured  evidence. 
It  is  an  authentic  copy  from  a  proclamation  is- 

59 


60         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

sued  by  the  German  general  in  command  of  the 
German  army  at  Liege.  It  has  never  been 
denied,  either  by  him  or  by  his  Government. 
It  is  a  fair  sample  of  a  flood  of  German  military 
proclamations  issued  throughout  Belgium.  It 
states  the  German's  case  in  the  German's  own 
words. 

Contrast  with  this  the  proclamations  that, 
upon  the  staggeringly  amazing  advent  of  the 
invaders,  the  Belgian  Government  issued  and 
caused  to  be  posted  in  every  Belgian  city,  town, 
village  and  countryside.  They  dotted  the 
walls ;  they  met  the  most  casual  eye  along  every 
road;  they  were  amplified  by  the  personal  in- 
structions of  every  policeman  in  every  locality. 
Reprinted  frequently  in  the  newspapers  of  the 
United  States,  they  are  already  familiar  to  all 
Americans.  It  is  sufficient  here  to  repeat  that 
these  proclamations  instructed  "the  civil  popu- 
lation not  to  participate  in  any  way  in  military 
operations"  and  commanded  the  surrender  to 
the  authorities  of  all  arms  in  the  possession  of 
civilians. 

It  has  been  suggested  by  some  German  sym- 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  61 

pathizers  that  the  Belgians  were  so  illiterate  as 
to  be  unable  to  read  these  proclamations.  The 
reply  to  that,  laving  aside  the  verbal  digests  of 
the  proclamations  made  everywhere  by  the  po- 
lice, is  to  be  found  in  a  Belgian  governmental 
report  on  illiteracy  made  in  1913.  In  treating 
of  the  provinces  in  which  the  German  atrocities 
were  subsequently  committed,  this  report  shows 
the  percentage  of  illiteracy,  among  men  liable 
to  militia  service  and  may  therefore  be  taken 
as  a  fair  test  of  the  entire  younger  population — 
in  other  words,  of  the  people  whom  the  invad- 
ers charged  with  firing  upon  German  troops. 
Here  are  the  figures : 

Illiterates. 

Per  Cent. 

For  the  Province  of  Brabant  1. 1 5 

For  the  Province  of  Liege O.99 

For  the  Province  of  Limbourg    O.52 

For  the  Province  of  Luxembourg     . .  .  0.20 
For  the  Province  of  Namur     .  . . 0.29 

Obviously,  we  must  seek  our  explanation 
elsewhere. 

The  Kingdom  of  Belgium,  as  it  existed  in 
August,  T914,  was  a  neutral  country,  and  had 


62         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

been  since  its  beginning.  Neutrality  was  in- 
herent in  its  inception.  In  fact,  only  on  its 
promise  of  neutrality  did  the  Great  Powers  al- 
low it  to  come  into  being.  Upon  its  declaration 
of  independence,  those  Powers — Prussia,  Aus- 
tria, Russia,  France  and  England — on  June 
26,  1831,  signed  and  promulgated  "The  Treaty 
of  Eighteen  Articles,"  which  specifically  or- 
dered : 

"Belgium,  within  the  limits  traced  in  con- 
formity with  the  principles  laid  down  in  the 
present  preliminaries,  shall  form  a  perpetually 
neutral  State.  The  Five  Powers,  without 
wishing  to  intervene  in  the  internal  affairs  of 
Belgium,  guarantee  her  that  perpetual  neutral- 
ity as  ivell  as  the  inviolability  of  her  terri- 
tory. .  .  . 

"By  just  reciprocity,  Belgium  shall  be  held 
to  observe  this  same  neutrality  toward  all  the 
other  States  and  to  make  no  attack  on  their 
internal  or  external  tranquillity  whilst  always 
preserving  the  right  to  defend  herself  against 
any  foreign  aggression." 

These  same  terms  were  reiterated  in  the  de- 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  63 

finitive  treaty  of  January  23,  1839,  accepted  by 
Belgium  and  guaranteed  by  the  Powers. 

From  that  year  until  last,  all  parties  kept 
their  pledge.  Belgium  maintained  no  army, 
save  for  the  purposes  of  defense;  England, 
France,  Russia  and  the  Germanic  empires 
never  trespassed.  "When,  in  1870,  as  now,  the 
two  of  those  Powers  lying  on  either  side  of 
Belgium  were  at  war,  she  was  left  unmolested: 
her  neutrality  was  considered  so  sacred  that 
even  the  German  wounded  in  France  might  not 
be  carried  through  her  territory  to  their  home- 
hospitals. 

Germany,  indeed,  was  especially  punctilious 
and  protective.  Not  only  once,  but  often,  she 
officially  expressed  her  friendliness  and  was  at 
pains  to  pose  as  Belgium's  protector.  No 
longer  ago  than  1910,  Kaiser  Wilhelm  II  paid, 
at  Brussels,  a  state  visit  to  the  King  of  the 
Belgians,  formally  pronounced  his  admiration 
of  Belgium's  institutions  and  thanked  that  na- 
tion for  it^  many  kindnesses  to  German  resi- 
dent- and  for  the  opportunities  that  it  gave 
them  to  make  their  fortunes  within  its  borders. 


64         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

In  191 3,  the  same  Kaiser  sent  his  general,  von 
Emmich,  as  his  empire's  special  representative 
to  the  Belgian  King's  fete  at  Liege,  bearing 
"the  solemn  assurance"  of  Germany's  friend- 
ship and  protection. 

Then,  on  Sunday,  the  second  of  August, 
1 914,  Germany  handed  Belgium  the  following 
ultimatum  and  demanded  a  reply  within  twelve 
hours: 

''The  German  Government  has  received  positive  in- 
formation according  to  which  French  forces  intend  to 
march  upon  the  Meuse  by  way  of  Givet  and  Namur. 
This  information  leaves  no  doubt  as  to  France's  inten- 
tion to  march  upon  Germany  through  Belgian  terri- 
tory. The  Imperial  German  Government  cannot  help 
fearing  that  Belgium,  in  spite  of  her  willingness  to 
prevent  this,  may  not  be  in  a  position  to  repulse,  with- 
out assistance,  a  French  movement  of  such  propor- 
tions. This  fact  is  significant  evidence  of  a  French 
attack  directed  against  Germany. 

"It  is  Germany's  imperative  duty  of  self-preserva- 
tion to  forestall  this  attack  of  the  enemy. 

"The  German  Government  would  greatly  regret  if 
Belgium  should  regard  as  an  act  of  hostility  directed 
against  herself  the  fact  that  the  steps  taken  by  Ger- 
many's enemies  oblige  her,  on  her  side,  to  violate  Bel- 
gian territory. 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  65 

"In  order  to  avoid  any  misunderstanding,  the  Ger- 
man Government  declares  the  following: 

"ist:  Germany  does  not  contemplate  any  hostile 
act  against  Belgium.  If  Belgium — in  the  war  which  is 
imminent — will  consent  to  adopt  an  attitude  of  friendly 
neutrality  toward  Germany,  the  German  Government 
on  the  other  hand  promises  that,  when  peace  is  con- 
cluded, it  will  protect  the  Kingdom  and  all  its  posses- 
sions to  their  fullest  extent. 

"2nd :  Germany  promises,  on  the  condition  set 
forth  above,  to  evacuate  Belgian  territory  as  soon  as 
peace  is  concluded. 

"3rd:  If  Belgium  preserves  a  friendly  attitude, 
Germany  declares  herself  ready,  in  concurrence  with 
the  authorities  of  the  Belgian  Government,  to  buy  for 
ready  cash  everything  necessary  to  its  troops,  and  to 
indemnify  Belgium  for  the  damage  caused  in  her  ter- 
ritory. 

"4th:  Should  Belgium  behave  in  a  hostile  manner 
toward  German  troops,  especially  by  placing  difficulties 
in  the  line  of  their  march,  or  by  resisting  with  the  forts 
of  the  Meuse,  or  by  destroying  highways,  railroads  and 
tunnels  or  other  works,  Germany  shall  be  obliged  to 
consider  Belgium  as  an  enemy. 

"In  that  case,  Germany  will  make  HO  promises  to  the 
Kingdom,  but  will  leave  to  the  decision  of  anns  the 
regulation  of  the  ultimate  relations  of  the  two  States 
toward  each  other.  The  German  Government  is  justi- 
fied in  hoping  that  this  eventuality  will  not  arise,  and 
that  the  Belgian  Government  will  take  appropriate 
steps  to  prevent  its  arising.     In  that  case  the  friendly 


66        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

relations  of  the  two  States  will  become  closer  and  more 
lasting." 

Belgium's  reply  is  already  famous.  It  was 
to  this  effect : 

"The  intentions  which  she  (Germany)  attributes  to 
France  are  in  contradiction  to  the  formal  declarations 
made  to  us  under  date  of  August  ist  in  the  name  of 
the  Government  of  the  Republic. 

"Moreover,  if,  contrary  to  our  expectations,  the 
country's  neutrality  should  be  violated  by  France,  Bel- 
gium would  fulfill  its  international  duties,  and  her 
army  would  oppose  a  most  vigorous  resistance  to  the 
invader. 

"The  treaties  of  1839,  confirmed  by  the  treaties  of 
1870,  perpetuate  Belgium's  independence  and  neutral- 
ity under  the  guarantee  of  the  Powers,  and  especially 
under  the  guarantee  of  the  Government  of  his  Majesty 
the  King  of  Prussia. 

"Belgium  has  always  faithfully  observed  her  inter- 
national obligations;  she  has  fulfilled  her  duties  in  a 
spirit  of  loyal  impartiality;  she  has  neglected  no  oppor- 
tunity to  maintain  her  neutrality  and  to  cause  it  to  be 
respected  by  others. 

"The  attack  upon  her  independence  with  which  Ger- 
many menaces  her  is  a  flagrant  violation  of  the  law  of 
Nations. 

"No  strategic  interest  can  justify  the  violation  of 
that  right. 

"The  Belgian  Government,  by  accepting  the  propo- 
sitions mentioned,  would  sacrifice  its  national  honor 


'  ■:■■  B   '     in  refute 
in  /I me  ^  '' 

'I  me  King  01    nn    Bei  ci 

'  u  !  /eminent  be  disappointed  in  its  expectations 

it  is  resolved  to  repulse  by  every  means  in  its  power  an  at- 
'     ■■  upon  i'  j  nghi 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  67 

and  betray  at  the  same  time  its  duty  toward  Europe. 

"Conscious  of  the  role  which  Belgium  has  played  for 
more  than  eighty  years  in  the  civilized  world,  it  refuses 
to  believe  that  its  independence  can  only  be  preserved 
at  the  price  of  a  violation  of  its  neutrality. 

"If  the  Belgian  Government  be  disappointed  in  its 
expectations,  it  is  resolved  to  repulse  by  every  means 
in  its  power  any  attack  upon  its  rights." 

A  part  of  what  instantly  followed,  the  world 
already  knows;  the  whole  of  those  horrors  it 
can  never  know.  Here  and  now,  considering 
that  the  Belgian  reply  speaks  for  itself,  I  want 
to  call  your  attention  to  some  of  the  italicized 
phrases  in  the  German  ultimatum:  the  italics, 
of  course,  are  my  own. 

Germany,  which  helped  to  make  Belgium's 
birth  as  a  nation  dependent  upon  her  neutrality, 
has  offered  only  one  excuse  for  the  German 
army's  violation  of  that  neutrality:  she  has  said 
that,  at  the  time  of  issuing  her  ultimatum  to 
Belgium,  French  troops  had  already  entered 
Belgium.  But  she  has  never  produced  one 
scrap  of  evidence  to  support  this  contention ;  of 
the  alleged  proofs  that  she  discovered  upon  her 
seizure  of  the  Belgian  Government  offices  in 


68         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Brussels — as  if,  were  they  guilty  of  conspiracy 
with  France,  the  Belgians,  leisurely  evacuating 
their  capital,  would  be  fools  enough  to  leave 
such  incriminating  documents  behind  them! — 
she  has,  among  all  her  frantic  attempts  at  jus- 
tification, failed  to  publish  a  single  instance; 
and,  above  all,  she  did  not  mention  this  French 
invasion  in  her  ultimatum :  at  a  moment  when 
she  desperately  wanted  an  excuse  to  send  her 
own  troops  into  Belgium,  at  a  moment  when 
her  diplomats  were  racking  their  brains  for 
raising  to  the  plane  of  "a  military  necessity" 
what  is  now  shown  to  be  no  more  than  a  bar- 
baric advantage,  Germany  could  find  nothing 
better  to  charge  than  "positive  information"  of 
France's  intention. 

This  cannot  be  too  strongly  insisted  upon. 
The  tone  of  that  ultimatum  was  not  the  tone  of 
diplomatic  suggestion  and  polite  innuendo;  it 
was  a  downright  threat.  Not  even  a  German 
apologist  would  call  it  restrained.  Had  Ger- 
many had  "positive  information"  of  France's 
actual  invasion  instead  of  "positive  informa- 
tion" of  "France's  intention"  to  invade,  the 


WEATHER-SIGXALS  69 

tone  of  this  very  ultimatum  shows  that  she 
would  have  shouted  it  to  Belgium  and  blazoned 
it  to  the  world.  Is  it  to  be  supposed  that  a 
spy-system  which  can  obtain  "positive  informa- 
tion" of  the  mere  intention  of  an  enemy's 
inarch,  could  not  obtain  any  information  of  an 
actual  march  on  the  part  of  that  enemy? 

We  are  compelled,  then,  to  conclude  that 
Germany  was  telling  the  truth  when,  on  August 
2d,  her  ultimatum  made  it  clear  that  she  had 
no  belief  in  a  French  violation  of  Belgian  neu- 
trality as  a  thing  already  accomplished — com- 
pelled to  conclude  that  she  was  then  telling  the 
truth  in  spite  of  her  later  declarations  that  she 
was  lying.  Therefore,  when  Belgium  bravely 
asserted  her  right  to  resist  invaders,  Germany, 
on  her  own  showing,  "violated  Belgian  terri- 
tory/' the  neutrality  of  which  she  had  sworn  to 
protect.  She  did  this  "making  no  promises" 
in  case  of  resistencc  to  her,  although,  in  the 
same  breath  admitting  Belgium's  "willingness 
to  prevent"  I'rance's  alleged  intention  to  in- 
vade. Tn  other  words,  she  perjured  herself  for 
DO    better    reason    than    that    she    had    heard 


70         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

France  intended  to  commit  perjury.  It  was 
only  two  days  after  the  issuance  of  the  ultima- 
tum that,  from  the  tribune  of  the  Reichstag, 
the  Chancellor  of  the  German  Empire  admit- 
ted: 

"Our  troops  have  occupied  Luxembourg, 
and  are  perhaps  even  now  trampling  upon  Bel- 
gian soil:  This  act  is  contrary  to  the  law  of 
Nations." 

It  might  be  pleaded  that,  in  resistence  to  an 
invader  who  is  breaking  "promises  voluntarily 
given,"  a  civilian  population  would  have  some 
excuse.  In  the  case  of  Belgium,  there  is  no 
necessity  so  to  plead.     Consider  the  facts. 

The  Belgian  Government  did,  as  we  have 
seen,  its  best  to  keep  its  non-combatant  citizens 
within  bounds:  its  hands  are,  beyond  all  cavil, 
clean.  All  that  the  Germans  seriously  charge 
is  that  the  Belgian  Government's  efforts  were 
here  and  there  futile. 

Is  this  correct?  Did  Belgian  civilians  dis- 
obey their  Government's  instructions?  Let  us 
grant,  for  the  sake  of  argument,  that  they  did. 
Let  us  grant  that  certain  villagers,  surprised 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  71 

and  robbed  by  the  troops  of  a  Power  which  they 
had  previously  believed  to  be  friendly,  offered, 
in  defense  of  their  "threatened  homes,"  a  cer- 
tain impotent  resistance :  one,  a  dozen,  a  score, 
even  a  scattered  hundred,  against  the  vast  Im- 
perial German  Army.  By  the  Second  Article  of 
the  Hague  Convention,  "if  the  arms  be  carried 
openly  and  the  rules  of  warfare  be  respected," 
such  acts  are  authorized  uas  long  as  the  terri- 
tory is  not  effectively  invested  and  occupied  by 
the  enemy."  l 

Go  further.  Admit  what  cannot  possibly  in 
every  case  be  true :  admit  that,  in  each  instance 
of  outrage,  the  arms  of  those  Belgian  civilians 
who  were  said  to  shoot,  had  not  been  "carried 
openly";  that  "the  rules  of  warfare"  were  not 
respected;  that  the  immediate  territory  ivas  at 
those  times  "effectively  invested  and  occupied 
by  the  enemy,"  does  ordinary  justice  and  com- 
mon humanity — I  am  not  talking  now  of  "civi- 
lized" war,  but  of  the  ordinary  justice  and 
common  humanity  that  we  had  a  right  to  expect 

»"The    Case    for    Belgium."    Published    for    the    Belgian 

Delegates  to  the  United  States  by  the  Macmillun  Company, 
I9I4- 


J2         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

some  trace  of  in  a  Germany  who  sought  to  im- 
pose her  Culture  on  a  world — does  such  justice 
and  such  humanity  hold  a  "whole  population 
collectively  responsible  for  the  acts  of  a  small 
number  of  individuals?"  * 

But  we  may  as  well  consider  even  the  rules 
of  "civilized"  war.  "If,"  as  the  Belgian  dele- 
gates well  pointed  out,  "the  son  of  the  burgo- 
master at  Aerschot  had  been  convicted  of  the 
killing  of  the  German  officer;  if  some  inhabit- 
ants of  Louvain  had  really  fired  upon  German 
troops,  the  Germans  might  have  had  the  au- 
thors of  such  acts  punished  under  the  law  of 
the  conqueror ;  instead,  by  taking  hostages,  by 
executing  innocent  men,  by  disseminating 
everywhere  terror,  fire  and  death,  by  substitut- 
ing— as  savages  do — joint  responsibility  for 
individual  responsibility,  they  have  dishonored 
warfare  and  forever  destroyed  the  guaranties 
which  the  law  of  nations  accords  to  peaceful 
and  non-combatant  civilians.  If  such  actions 
were  not  held  up  to  universal  reproof,  then 
nothing  would  remain  of  this  International 

i  Ibid. 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  7$ 

Law,  which,  for  the  last  half  century,  civilized 
peoples  have  striven  for  and  codified." 

Upon  that  point,  the  same  delegates  tellingly 
quote  Bluntschli,  a  jurist  whose  word  is  author- 
itative: 

"The  present  International  Law  denies  entirely  the 
right  to  dispose  arbitrarily  of  the  fate  of  individuals, 
and  docs  not  admit  of  ill-treatment  or  violence  against 
them.  Personal  security,  honor  and  liberty  are  private 
rights  which  the'  laws  of  war  do  not  permit  to  be  at- 
tacked. The  enemy  may  take  such  steps  only  as  are 
necessary  for  military  operations  or  necessary  for  the 
safety  of  the  State." 

My  father  used  to  tell  the  story  of  a  famous 
defense  at  law  set  up  by  a  woman  who  was  sued 
for  breaking  a  pitcher  that  a  neighbor  had  lent 
her. 

This  defendant  contended: 

"i.  The  pitcher  was  not  broken  when  I  re- 
turned it. 

"2.  The  pitcher  was  broken  when  lent  me. 

"3.   T  never  borrowed  the  pitcher." 

That  line  of  defense  is  closely  paralleled  by 
the  general  defense  of  Germany's  actions  in 
Belgium.     It  runs: 


74         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 


a . 


I.  There  were  no  hardships  upon  non-com- 
batants for  non-combatants  to  resist. 

"2.  The  non-combatants  resisted  the  hard- 
ships that  we  imposed  upon  them. 

"3.  The  entire  population  was  in  arms :  there 
were  no  non-combatants." 

If  one  of  these  statements  is  true,  the  re- 
maining two  are  false.  If  any  is  true,  the 
terms  of  the  Hague  Convention  and  Blunt- 
schli's  undisputed  interpretation  of  Interna- 
tional Law  still  remain  to  convict  the  German 
Army. 

Only  two  arguments  are  left,  and  these  are 
as  mutually  contradictory  as  their  predecessors. 
They  are  that  there  were  perhaps  "a  few  iso- 
lated cases  of  green  German  soldiers  who  got 
out  of  hand  and  ran  amuck  at  the  start  of  the 
war,"  and  that  the  Belgian  testimony  of  un- 
warranted outrages,  of  rape  and  murder,  is  a 
pack  of  lies.  But  the  German  horrors  in  Bel- 
gium cannot  be  convincingly  interpreted  as  the 
result  of  "green  soldiers"  getting  "out  of 
hand":  although  such  cases  are  indeed  com- 
mon to  every  war,  unavoidable  in  every  war — 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  75 

although  they  constitute  one  of  the  deep  dam- 
nations of  war  itself — here  in  Belgium  we 
have  as  the  offender  an  invading  army  which 
has  in  almost  every  other  respect  made  good 
its  long  boast  of  the  utmost  in  efficiency,  of 
discipline  down  to  the  minutest  detail;  and  yet 
this  army  commits  continuous  outrages  not 
only  after  the  opening  battles,  but  throughout 
three  months  of  warfare.  Lies?  Some  of 
course  there  are — even  there  is  some  epidemic 
of  lying.  But  are  we  to  assume  that  the  entire 
population  is  infected ;  that  hundreds  of  volun- 
tary witnesses,  unknown  to  one  another  and 
unacquainted  with  one  another's  testimony, 
could  corroborate  one  another  by  mere  coinci- 
dence— that,  in  brief,  the  whole  Belgian  race 
is  a  race  of  inspired  liars? 

Against  such  a  preposterous  supposition  it 
is  necessary  to  set  nothing.  Nevertheless,  I 
set  two  undenied  facts.  Nobody  that  has 
passed  through  a  looted  Belgian  town  has 
failed  to  see  chalked  on  certain  rare  doors  some 
such  phrase  as  "These  people  are  friendly;  do 
not  plunder";  the  passing  German  officers,  if 


y6         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

indeed  they  themselves  did  not  cause  it  to  be 
written,  must  either  have  seen  it  or  been  crim- 
inally negligent:  does  it,  or  does  it  not,  imply 
that  plundering  was  going  on?  Remember 
that  chalked  phrase,  and  then  remember  that  it 
was  the  great  Bismarck  himself  who  said: 

"Above  all,  you  must  inflict  on  the  inhabit- 
ants of  invaded  towns  the  maximum  of  suffer- 
ing, so  that  they  may  become  sick  of  the  strug- 
gle and  may  bring  pressure  to  bear  upon  their 
government  to  discontinue  it.  You  must  leave 
the  people  through  whose  land  you  march  only 
their  eyes  to  weep  with." 

Read,  also,  the  words  of  von  Bernhardi  in 
"Germany  and  the  Next  War"  and  see  how 
their  acid  philosophy,  quite  harmless  in  intelli- 
gent hands,  will  surely  be  transmuted  in  the 
brutal  minded  into  direct  command  to  slaugh- 
ter and  burn  and  steal. 

Read,  last  of  all,  the  super-brutal  cynicism 
of  Prof.  Treitschke,  who  would  improve  the 
human  species  by  extinguishing  those  he 
liked  least. 

When  you  have   pondered   these  amazing 


WEATHER-SIGNALS  77 

beliefs  of  the  German  philosophers  you  will  no 
longer  have  to  see  pictures  of  slaughtered  Bel- 
gian women  and  children  in  order  to  be  con- 
vinced of  the  reality.  You  will  know  that  the 
philosophy  of  the  German  war-mad,  in  which 
Almighty  God  is  curiously  uncounted,  could 
have  produced  naught  else. 


IV 

AVALANCHE 

In  the  preceding  chapter  there  was  frequent 
reference  to  the  report  of  the  Belgian  Dele- 
gates to  the  United  States.  The  body  of  that 
report  is  so  full  of  carefully  sifted  evidence  of 
rape,  murder,  torture  and  wanton  destruction 
that  one  may  well  wonder  why  any  writer 
should  now  pause  to  add  to  it.  It  would  seem, 
too,  that  if  those  delegates  left  anything  un- 
said, what  they  left  has  been  abundantly  sup- 
plied by  the  newspapers'  war-correspondents 
and  by  the  authors  of  several  books  about  the 
war,  who  have  had  far  better  opportunities  for 
observation  and  investigation  than  fell  to  my 
lot.  My  answer  is  this :  I  know  what  has  al- 
ready been  done  over  here  for  Belgium's  suffer- 
ing non-combatants,  and  I  am  proud  of  my 
country's  present  response  to  their  appeal ;  but, 

since  my  return  to  America,  I  have  found  that 

78 


AVALANCHE  79 

a  large  portion  of  our  public  is  still  withhold- 
ing its  help  because  it  is  still  unconvinced  of  the 
necessity  for  help.  No  land  is  so  ready  with 
its  charity  as  is  this  land,  but  no  land  is  so 
level-headed;  Americans  are  generous,  but 
they  do  not  like  to  have  their  generosity  im- 
posed upon;  they  will  gladly  give  their  last  cent 
available,  but  the  native  of  every  State  "comes 
from  Missouri."  In  view  of  this,  not  one 
piece  of  evidence  concerning  the  wrongs  done 
in  Belgium  should  be  lost;  the  telling  of  the 
slightest  instance  may  bring  some  new  bit 
of  assistance — and  every  bit  is  desperately 
needed. 

Realizing,  however,  that  what  I  saw  of  Ger- 
man atrocities  was,  after  all,  seen  with  the  eyes 
of  an  outsider  by  no  means  so  well  furnished 
with  powers  to  take  him  about  among  the 
scenes  of  destruction  as  the  accredited  corre- 
spondents at  the  front,  I  shall  here  concern 
myself  not  with  such  after-evidences  as  I 
chanced  to  observe,  but  with  the  testimony 
given  me  by  eye- witnesses  of  the  actual  hap- 
pening- and  by  some  of  the  victims  themselves. 


80         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

To  repeat  every  convincing  tale  that  was  told 
me  would  be  to  make  a  book  far  larger  than 
this  book  may  be ;  it  would  be  the  narrative  of 
some  details  that  may  better  be  left — and  can 
safely  be  left — to  the  discriminating  imagina- 
tion of  the  reader ;  and  it  would  be  to  pile  hor- 
ror upon  horror  until  my  audience  was  sated 
beyond  any  response  to  Belgium's  needs.  My 
task  is,  therefore,  largely  one  of  selection. 

The  stories  told  me,  though  they  for  the 
most  part  passed  the  mere  inventive  powers  of 
their  tellers,  and  though  they  varied  as  much 
in  detail  as  they  corresponded  in  tenor  and  con- 
viction, were  generally  characterized  by  the 
qualities  that  I  noticed  in  those  told  by  the  early 
refugees  to  Ostend.  They  had  a  brevity,  a 
bare  statement  of  fact,  that  conveyed  a  special 
sense  of  horror.  When  the  speakers  were  of 
the  class  that  has  acquired  the  gift  of  verbal 
picture-making,  they  were  as  a  rule  still  too 
stunned  to  employ  that  gift.  This,  neverthe- 
less, they  had  to  the  last  man  and  woman 
among  them — almost  to  the  last  child:  they 
had  a  wonderful,  a  touching  faith  in  what 


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AVALANCHE  81 

America  could  and  would  do  for  them.  One 
and  all,  they  were  possessed  by  that  splendid 
belief  in  the  greatness  and  goodness  of  the 
Republic  beyond  the  seas.  Over  and  over 
again — from  the  lips  of  the  aged,  who  had  seen 
burnt  the  little  houses  and  gardens  that  they 
had  for  years  labored  to  maintain;  from  the 
tongues  of  women  whose  husbands  had  been 
shot  down  in  plain  view  of  their  helpless 
wives;  out  of  the  mouths  of  newly-made 
orphans — I  heard  the  words: 

"America  is  doing  so  much;  it  can  do  so 
much;  it  will  do  so  much.  When  America 
knows  all,  we  shall  be  saved.  Yours  is  the 
great  peaceful  nation;  it  is  the  true  Power  at 
The  Hague;  it  will  stop  these  infamies." 

I  have  not  always,  I  fear,  been  a  very  loyal 
American;  but  no  American  could  think  ill  of 
his  country  when  he  realized  how  these  home- 
less and  stricken  people  of  a  foreign  land 
believed  in  the  charity  and  justice  of  the  United 
States. 

Another  note  was  often  repeated,  especially 
by    those    refugees    from    villages   along   the 


82         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

German  border  where  no  real  fighting  had 
taken  place  between  the  hordes  of  the  invader 
and  the  little  army  of  Belgium.  This  was  the 
note  of  absolute  bewilderment  at  the  sudden- 
ness of  the  catastrophe.  Even  in  that  coun- 
try, it  reminded  me  of  stories  that  I  have  heard 
Swiss  mountaineers  tell  of  avalanches  in  the 
Alps: 

"We  were  at  work.  We  were  doing  nothing 
wrong.  We  were  at  work  in  our  fields,  and 
they  made  us  stop  our  work." 

There  was  a  man  of  perhaps  seventy  years. 
His  face  was  bandaged.  He  had  worked  for 
a  generation  as  a  small  farmer,  and  the  soil 
had  called  until  he  bent  double  toward  it. 

"In  the  village  north  of  mine,"  he  said, 
"there  was  a  company  of  our  little  soldiers; 
but  they  were  not  in  our  village.  Then  we  did 
not  even  know  that  they  were  anywhere  near. 
Along  the  road  beside  which  I  was  working 
came  some  men  on  bicycles.  They  passed  and 
presently  returned.  Then  they  came  back 
again,  and  this  time  with  them  a  great,  great 


AVALANCHE  83 

many  soldiers  on  foot — soldiers  in  gray  and 
wearing  helmets:  Germans.  They  called  me 
out  of  the  field.  I  am  old,  you  observe,  and  I 
walk  slowly.  When  I  did  not  come  quickly 
enough  to  please  them,  two  ran  forward  and 
pricked  me  with  their  bayonets.  You  see  this 
cut  in  my  cheek." 

He  loosened  the  bandage.  Just  below  his 
right  cheek-bone  an  ugly  red  wound  sliced  the 
wrinkled  skin. 

"There  is  another  wound  in  my  shoulder," 
he  went  on.  "When  their  officer  saw  these 
things  done,  he  laughed;  but  he  told  his  men 
to  be  careful,  because,  he  said,  I  and  my  fellow- 
villagers  should  presently  be  needed. 

"We  went  on  into  the  village.  Out  of  each 
field,  the  Germans  gathered  all  the  workers, 
women  as  well  as  men.  Also  in  the  village 
itself.  There  they  put  us  in  front  of  them — 
two  of  our  women  had  babies  at  the  breast. 
If  we  lagged,  they  said,  we  should  be  shot,  and 
those  of  us  nearest  the  soldiers  were  pricked 
on  by  the  soldiers'  bayonets.     At  a  turn  of  the 


84  IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

road,  we  saw,  ahead  of  us,  a  line  of  Belgian 
infantry,  their  rifles  ready.  The  German  offi- 
cers said  to  us : 

"  'You  will  stoop  down  when  we  fire,  and, 
when  we  have  fired,  you  will  stand  again  and 
march  forward  with  us  behind  you.  If  you 
disobey,  we  shall  kill  you  where  you  stand/ 

''We  did  it — most  of  us.  We  had  to.  We 
were  helpless.  One  of  the  women  with  a  baby 
was  perhaps  too  much  afraid;  she  fell  before  a 
shot  was  fired.  An  officer  nodded,  and  a 
soldier  put  his  bayonet  through  her  breast  as 
she  lay  on  the  ground.  She  screeched  and 
died. 

"  'Now  you  see  what  will  happen  to  you !' — 
The  officers  said  that. 

"They  kicked  the  woman's  body  aside,  and 
the  body  of  the  crying  baby,  and  we  marched 
on  .  .  .  When  the  firing  became  general,  I 
pretended  to  be  shot ;  I  fell  down  and  rolled  into 
the  ditch  beside  the  road." 

Some  instances  have  been  cited  in  America 
of  the  burgomaster  and  parish  priest  of  one 
village  or  another  being  seized  by  the  enemy 


AVALANCHE  85 

on  entering  a  hamlet  and  held  as  hostages. 
These  instances  were  not  rare;  they  were  the 
custom,  a  part  of  the  plan  of  campaign.  When 
the  invaders  remained  overnight  in  the  village, 
those  hostages  were  kept  under  guard.  If, 
during  the  night,  a  drunken  soldier's  insult  to 
a  villager's  wife  was  resented  by  her  husband 
— if,  an  Uhlan  having  drunk  a  cottager's  wine, 
tried  to  seize  that  cottager's  daughter  and  was 
struck  by  her  father — then  the  priest  and 
burgomaster  would  be  marched  into  the  village 
street,  the  people  called  out  and  the  hostages 
executed.  More  often  the  exacted  atonement 
was  still  more  widely  vicarious: 

"It  is  with  my  consent  that  the  Commander- 
in-Chief  has  ordered  the  whole  town  to  be 
burned  and  that  about  one  hundred  people  have 
been  shot.  I  bring  this  fact  to  the  knowledge 
of  the  city  of  Liege  so  that  the  citizens  of 
Liege  may  realize  the  fate  with  which  they  are 
menaced." 

I  am  far  from  denying  that  certain  of  the 
hundreds  of  stories  of  rape  were  false.  In 
Antwerp,  in  the  early  days  of  the  war,  the  com- 


86         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

man  salutation  of  the  professional  peripatetic 
was  some  such  fabrication.  But  the  mere  fact 
that  these  stories  were  seized  upon  as  credible 
by  those  women  is  some  evidence  to  the  preva- 
lence of  outrages  upon  innocent  girls.  The 
Belgian  Commission  alone  has  authenticated 
many  cases  beyond  all  shadow  of  doubt,  and  to 
these  have  been  added  scores  of  equally  unim- 
peachable instances  gathered  by  reputable  war- 
correspondents.  There  are  the  stories  told  to 
nurses  in  faltering  syllables  by  young  girls 
whose  relatives,  having  been  murdered,  could 
not  have  put  the  words  into  their  mouths,  and 
whose  previous  upbringing  precluded  the 
theory  that  they  could  have  learned  in  any  way 
save  that  at  which  they  hinted  some  of  the. 
deeds  done  to  them.  Not  infrequently  these 
deeds  were  of  a  sort  of  which  only  alienists  and 
madmen  have  a  real  knowledge.  I  know  some- 
thing of  the  Belgian  people,  and  I  know  that 
the  details  of  the  stories  to  which  I  refer  would 
never  have  been  known  by  their  narrators — in 
some  instances,  children  of  ten  and  twelve — 


AVALANCHE  87 

had  those  narrators  not  been  the  victims  of  the 
crimes  that  they  described. 

".  .  .  So  they  killed  my  father  and  mother," 
said  a  little  girl  of  fifteen:  "those  four  soldiers 
that  came  into  our  house  after  the  servants  had 
run  away.  They  did  it  because  my  father  was 
a  notary  and  had  papers  about,  and  the  Ger- 
mans said  he  was  a  spy  spying  on  them.  And 
then — "  She  hid  her  face,  but  ears  and  neck 
were  crimson.  "And  then — You  know  what  I 
mean,  madame,"  she  sobbed  in  the  nurse's 
arms:  "those  four  bad  men!" 

A  Belgian  soldier  put  another  case  in  another 
manner.  His  company  was  passing  through  a 
town  that  the  Germans  had  temporarily  evacu- 
ated: 

"There  was  a  naked  old  woman  hanging 
from  a  telegraph-pole.  She  was  quite  dead, 
and  there  were  bayonet-wounds  in  her  breast. 
But  what  had  happened  to  her  before  she  was 
hanged  and  bayoneted — that  was  far  worse 
than  hanging." 

A  small  boy,  who  said  that  he  had  been  the 


88  IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

errand-boy  at  the  shop  of  a  wine-merchant  in 
Huy,  told  me  this : 

"The  German  soldiers  came  to  our  shop  and 
demanded  wine.  My  master  gave  it  and,  when 
they  had  drunk,  asked  payment.  Just  then  a 
German  lieutenant  came  in  the  door  and  heard 
my  master.  The  lieutenant  said:  'We  have 
conquered  your  country;  conquerors  do  not 
pay,  they  take/  He  took  a  bottle  himself, 
knocked  the  head  off  it  and  drank.  The  ragged 
glass  cut  his  lips,  and  this  made  him  angry. 
He  took  another  bottle  and  knocked  my  master 
down  with  it.  He  told  the  soldiers  to  take  all 
they  wanted,  and  he  must  have  told  other 
soldiers  when  he  went  out  into  the  street,  for 
some  more  came  in.  They  drank  all  they 
could  and  then  broke  bottles  and  smashed  casks 
and  poured  the  wine  on  the  floor.  They  looted 
the  cellars.  Then  they  went  out  and  set  fire  to 
all  the  houses  in  two  streets.  That  was  to- 
ward the  end  of  August.  .  .  ." 

"When  I  ran  away  from  my  village  on  the 
Ghent-road" — it  is  a  woman  of  thirty  that  is 
speaking  now,  and  she  carries  a  five-years-old 


AVALANCHE  89 

boy  swathed  in  bloody  bandages  over  wounds 
caused  by  flying  particles  of  flying  shell — "all 
the  people  left  alive  in  the  village  ran  with  me, 
for  the  Germans  had  told  us  that  they  would 
burn  the  place  and  that  all  remaining  would  be 
shot.  When  we  were  quite  exhausted,  we  came 
to  a  shrine  by  the  road,  and  our  cure,  who  was 
with  us,  stopped  us  there  to  pray.  We  knelt 
in  the  road,  monsieur,  and  we  prayed  for  our 
country.  We  prayed  also  for  our  dear  dead, 
and  our  husbands  who  were  at  the  war,  and  we 
prayed  that  the  Blessed  Virgin  would  inter- 
cede for  us — since  surely  we  must  have  done 
some  grave  wrong  to  be  so  punished,  though 
what  it  was  we  do  not  know — and  that,  now 
our  little  houses  were  gone,  we  might  be  given 
some  work — oh,  any  sort  of  honest  work — to 
do  in  order  to  feed  our  little  ones.  And  even 
while  we  were  praying,  some  of  those  Germans, 
having  followed  us  on  horseback  from  our  vil- 
lage, rode  up  and  said  we  had  committed  a 
crime  to  stop  when  they  had  told  us  to  go  on. 
And  so  they  took  five  of  the  old  men  and  stood 
them  in  the  road  and  shot  them.     One  was  my 


90         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

father.     They  did  not  let  us  stay  to  bury  my 
father." 

That  desire  to  work  is  another  characteristic 
of  your  Belgian.  Since  returning  to  America, 
I  have  heard  a  few  cynics,  who  knew  nothing  of 
the  people  of  Belgium,  say  that  most  of  the 
refugees  had  become  so  used  to  charity  as  to 
want  to  live  on  it  for  the  rest  of  their  lives. 
Anybody  at  all  acquainted  with  the  Belgian 
character  is  aware  that  a  scorn  of  idleness,  a 
love  of  thrift  and  a  pride  in  his  work  is  incul- 
cated in  the  Belgian.  These  are  national  traits. 
Nothing  else  could  have  made  Belgium  the 
wealthy  country  that  it  was  until  August,  19 14. 
Among  a  nation  made  homeless,  there  must 
inevitably  be  found  a  few  shirkers ;  but  I  ven- 
ture to  say  that  you  could  never  find  fewer  any- 
where than  can  be  found  among  these  suddenly 
dispossessed  Belgians.  Nearly  all,  they  are 
willing  to  undertake  any  task — the  once  richest 
of  them — however  menial  it  may  be.  They 
want  only  justice  for  their  country  and  work 
for   themselves.     This   woman   whose   father 


AVALANCHE  91 

had  been  shot  down  at  his  prayers  put  it  truly: 
"Any  sort  of  honest  work  in  order  to  feed  our 
little  ones.'' 

How  many  unoffending  fugitives  were  mas- 
sacred in  their  endeavors  to  escape  will,  of 
course,  never  be  known.  One  old  farmer  told 
me  of  crossing  a  small  stream  that  was  clogged 
by  the  bodies  of  such  refugees.  "I  saw  them 
heaped  there,"  he  said  with  a  dramatic  sense 
unusual  in  his  fellows :  "The  water  had  climbed 
up  behind  them  and  was  just  trickling  over  the 
top  of  the  pile.  Perhaps  they  were  better  so: 
what  are  we  that  are  alive  to  find  to  live  by?" 
Nothing,  it  would  certainly  seem,  remains  to 
them.  What  they  had,  in  their  own  land, 
amassed  by  years  of  slow  toil  and  painful  denial 
has  vanished.  Such  strength  as  was  left  them 
was  often  sapped  by  the  shock  of  their  losses, 
by  the  sights  confronting  them,  by  terrible 
journeys  through  flooded  fields  under  pelting 
rain,  by  wounds,  illness,  starvation.  In  their 
native-land  are  the  Germans;  the  hands  of 
France  are  full;  in  willing,  but  sadly  tried  Eng- 


92         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

land  and  in  America,  they  have  added  to  all 
these  disadvantages  the  disadvantage  of  an 
alien  tongue.  .  .  . 

The  complete  destitution  of  the  dispossessed 
is  a  tribute  to  the  vaunted  thoroughness  of  the 
race  whose  national  hero  admonished  it  to 
leave  its  enemies  "only  their  eyes  to  weep  with." 
Many  a  refugee  has  told  me  incidents  abun- 
dantly bearing  out  those  of  the  "fire-blackened 
houses"  where  Mr.  Powell  saw  hanging  "white 
flags  made  from  sheets  and  table-cloths  and 
pillow-cases — pathetic  appeals  for  the  mercy 
which  was  not  granted";  not  a  few  have  con- 
firmed the  same  author's  statement  that  at 
Aerschot  and  Louvain  the  Germans  "broke  the 
windows  of  houses  and  threw  in  sticks  which 
had  been  soaked  in  oil  and  dipped  in  sulphur," 
and  that  at  Termonde,  evacuated  by  the  inhabi- 
tants before  the  enemy  entered  it,  "they  used  a 
motor-car  equipped  with  a  large  tank  for  petrol, 
a  pump,  a  hose  and  a  spraying-nozzle."  *  I 
have  been  shown  some  of  the  small  rings  of 
guncotton,  about  an  inch  in  diameter,  such  as 

1 "  Fighting  in  Flanders."    Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 


— , , 


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AVALANCHE  93 

were  used  at  Termonde,  carried  in  bagsful  by 
the  German  troops  and,  when  ignited,  spreading 
fire  by  a  series  of  leaps  actuated  by  their  own 
explosion.  Where  the  invader  destroyed,  he 
destroyed  utterly. 

I  was  lucky  enough  to  talk  to  several  fugi- 
tives from  Liege,  Louvain,  Dinant,  Malines 
and  Aerschot.  Said  a  citizen  of  the  first-named 
of  these,  a  man  of  wealth  and  education: 

"We  had  been  warned  what  would  happen  if 
we  citizens  offered  armed  resistance,  but  when 
the  blow  fell,  it  fell  with  only  a  few  of  us,  if 
any,  knowing  that  such  futile  resistance  or  re- 
prisal had  been  attempted.  For  my  part,  I 
have  yet  to  learn  of  any.  The  Germans  fired 
the  rue  des  Pitteurs,  the  Place  de  l'Universite 
and  the  Quai  des  Pecheurs  without  so  much  as 
telling  the  sleeping  inhabitants  what  it  was  pro- 
posed to  do.  It  was  only  the  choking  smoke 
that  wakened  me  and  my  family.  Our  house 
was  in  flames.  Of  course  we  ran  out  of  it. 
The  German  troops  in  the  street  fired  on  us  as 
we  came  out,  wounding  my  daughter.  In  the 
same    manner    fifteen    persons    were    killed. 


94         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Later  I  saw  a  group  of  German  soldiers  flinging 
about  a  young  girl  in  the  open  street  of  a 
suburb.  I  protested.  They  told  me  that  they 
meant  to  kill  her,  and  my  entreaties  for  her  life 
merely  got  me  a  blow  with  a  rifle-butt  that 
knocked  me  down.  As  I  lay  there,  I  saw  them 
bayonet  the  girl.  I  know  of  no  reason  for  this 
outrage,  and  I  am  sure  that  the  victim  knew  of 
none.  A  seven-years-old  boy  was  playing  with 
a  toy-musket — one  of  those  children's  toys  that 
shoot  a  stick  for  five  yards  and  would  not  hurt  a 
baby:  a  passing  soldier  shot  the  little  fellow, 
declaring  that  the  lad  had  pointed  the  gun  at 
him.".  .  . 

"There  is  no  manner  of  doubt,"  said  a  mer- 
chant of  Louvain,  "that  in  my  city  the  alleged 
firing  of  non-combatants  upon  German  troops 
was,  in  reality,  German  soldiers  firing  on  a 
party  of  their  comrades  whom  they  mistook  for 
a  Belgian  force.  I  knew  it  because  I  saw  it. 
S*o  did  many  others.  Our  Government  has 
now  the  full  evidence.  Certainly  the  Germans 
themselves  knew  it;  they  spoke  of  it  about  the 
town.     But  either  because  their  error  angered 


AVALANCHE  95 

them  against  the  whole  world,  or  because  they 
wanted  a  pretext  for  destruction,  they  soon 
charged  the  shooting  to  the  citizens,  and  the 
massacre  and  burning  followed.".  .  . 

"The  Germans  say  that  there  were  Belgian 
troops  in  our  town  when  it  was  bombarded  and 
its  historic  monuments  destroyed,"  a  Malines 
physician  said  to  me.  "That  is  not  true.  I 
had  just  made  a  tour  of  the  town,  and  I  know 
that  what  I  say  is  the  fact.  More  than  that, 
the  Germans  knew  it.  German  officers  subse- 
quently admitted  it  in  my  hearing;  but  they 
said  that  the  bombardment  was  necessary  for 
'its  moral  effect.'  " 

The  case  of  once  beautiful  Dinant  is  thus 
stated  by  Victor  Yseux,  a  barrister,  a  Doctor 
of  Laws  and  a  former  president  of  the  Belgian 
Bar  Association : 

"On  the  2 1  st  of  August,  at  about  9  o'clock 
in  the  evening,  German  troops  came  into  Dinant 
d(  >\vn  the  road  from  Ciney  and  entered  Dinant 
by  the  Rue  St.  Jacques.  Xo  sooner  were  they 
in  the  town  than  they  began  firing  into  the 
windows  of  the  houses.     They  killed  a  work- 


96         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

man  who  was  returning  to  his  own  house  and 
wounded  another  inhabitant,  forcing  him  to 
cry  'Long  live  the  Kaiser !'  They  bayoneted  a 
third  in  the  abdomen.  Swaggering  into  the 
cafes,  they  seized  the  liquor,  got  drunk  and, 
going  out,  set  fire  to  several  houses. 

"At  6:30  a.  m.  of  the  next  Sunday,  German 
soldiers  of  the  One  Hundred  and  Eighth  Regi- 
ment of  Infantry  invaded  the  Church  of  the 
Premonstratensian  Fathers,  ordered  the  con- 
gregation to  leave,  separated  the  men  from  the 
women,  and  shot  fifty  of  the  former.  About 
an  hour  later,  the  Germans  unreservedly  gave 
themselves  up  to  pillage  and  arson.  They  went 
from  house  to  house,  driving  the  inhabitants 
into  the  street,  then  pillaging  and  firing  the 
dwellings.  Such  inhabitants  as  tried  to  escape 
their  insults  were  shot.  About  nine  in  the 
morning,  the  soldiery,  driving  before  them  by 
blows  from  the  butt-ends  of  rifles  men,  women 
and  children,  pushed  them  all  into  the  public 
square,  where  they  were  kept  prisoners  for  nine 
hours  while  their  houses  were  being  burnt  and 
robbed.     When  the  women  asked  what  was  to 


AVALANCHE  97 

be  done  with  them,  the  guard  answered  that 
they  were  to  be  shot. 

"At  last,  a  Captain  separated  the  men  from 
the  women  and  children.  The  women  were 
placed  in  front  of  a  rank  of  infantry  soldiers, 
the  men  were  then  ranged  along  a  wall.  The 
front  rank  of  them  was  ordered  to  kneel.  A 
platoon  of  soldiers  drew  up.  The  women  cried 
for  mercy  on  their  husbands,  sons  and  brothers, 
but  the  officer  ordered  his  men  to  fire.  There 
had  been  no  inquiry  and  no  pretense  of  trial. 
Perhaps  twenty  of  the  inhabitants  were  only 
wounded,  but  fell  among  the  dead.  The 
soldiers  fired  a  new  volley  into  the  heap  of  them. 
Several  citizens  escaped  this  double  discharge, 
shammed  dead  for  more  than  two  hours,  re- 
maining motionless  among  the  corpses,  and, 
when  night  fell,  escaped  to  the  hills.  Eighty- 
four  dead  were  left  on  the  square." 

That  was  not  the  only  massacre  at  Dinant. 
A  party  of  German  soldiers  found  some  citizens 
in  the  cellars  of  a  brewery  in  the  Eaubourg  St. 
Pierre  and  shot  them.  On  another  occasion, 
workmen  employed  by  a  M.  I  Iimmor  hid  them- 


98         IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

selves,  their  wives  and  children  in  the  cellar  of 
their  employer's  factory.  Forced  by  hunger, 
they  at  last  came  out,  carrying  a  white  flag. 
Every  man  was  instantly  shot.  "Nearly  all 
the  men  in  the  Faubourg  de  Neffe  were 
executed  en  masse,"  Dr.  Yseux  continues,  "and 
in  another  quarter  a  dozen  were  slaughtered  in 
a  cellar.  An  old  woman  and  all  of  her  chil- 
dren were  killed  in  their  cellar.  A  man  of 
sixty-five,  his  wife,  his  son  and  his  daughter 
were  shot  against  a  wall.  Other  inhabitants 
were  taken  in  a  barge  as  far  as  the  rock  of 
Bayard  and  shot  there,  among  them  a  woman 
eighty-three  years  old. 

"A  group  of  men  and  women  had  been  locked 
in  the  court  of  the  prison.  A  German  ma- 
chine gun,  placed  on  the  hill  above,  opened  fire 
on  them,  and  an  old  woman  and  three  other 
persons  were  brought  down.  Meanwhile,  sol- 
diers not  engaged  in  the  killing  sacked  the 
houses  of  the  town,  after  which  they  set  fire 
to  it. 

"Before  the  Germans  came  there,  Dinant  had 
fourteen  hundred  houses;  it  now  has  only  two 


AVALANCHE  99 

hundred.  Its  factories  have  been  practically 
obliterated.  At  least  seven  hundred  of  its  in- 
habitants have  been  killed;  others  have  been 
taken  to  Germany  and  are  there  held  prisoners; 
the  majority  are  refugees ;  a  few  who  remained 
in  the  town  are  dying  from  hunger."  * 

Three  accounts  have  been  given  of  the  cause 
of  the  Aerschot  massacre.  The  Belgians  have 
one;  the  Germans  two  and  each  of  those  two 
contradicts  the  other.  Nobody  denies  that 
Josef  Hielemans,  the  burgomaster,  a  brewer 
and  miller  with  a  reputation  for  mildness  and 
docility,  had  issued  many  proclamations  and 
circulars  commanding  the  townsfolk  to  placate 
the  invaders.  Nobody  denies  that  he  asked  the 
German  Chief  of  Staff  and  some  of  his  officers 
to  dine  at  the  Hielemans  house.  The  one  Ger- 
man story  says  that  the  citizens  rose  and  at- 
tacked their  conquerors  in  disregard  of  these 
friendly  advances  on  the  part  of  their  burgo- 
master; the  other  says  that  M.  Hielemans'  son 
shot  his  father's  guest  of  honor  at  table  and 
that  the  subsequent  massacre  was  by  way  of 

1  Substantially,    this    same    account    was    published    by    Dr. 
Yscux  in  the  New  York  Times  for  January  24,  1915. 


ioo       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

reprisal :  the  alleged  murderer  zvas  fifteen  years 
old.  The  Belgian  story,  as  I  heard  it,  is  that 
the  slaughter  was  started  by  the  killing  of  a 
German  officer  in  the  Grande  Place,  who  was 
hit  by  a  stray  bullet  from  one  of  the  guns  of 
some  German  troops  engaged  in  "shooting  up 
the  town,"  like  a  pack  of  desperadoes  in  our 
own  long  past  Wild  West,  with  a  view  to  ter- 
rifying the  inhabitants.  If  you  admit  one 
German  version,  you  give  the  lie  to  the  other; 
if  you  accept  the  Belgian,  you  have  an  account 
that  conforms  to  the  proved  action  of  German* 
troops  in  a  score  of  other  Belgian  towns  and 
villages. 

To  the  many  stories  of  the  massacre,  I  shall 
add  but  one.  It  was  told  in  England  by  a 
slim,  dark  woman,  whose  splendid  eyes  and 
drawn  face  made  more  eloquently  clear  than 
her  words  the  infamies  that  she  had  looked 
upon.  Mme.  von  de  Pol  fled  to  England  with 
her  three  children,  of  whom  the  oldest  is 
scarcely  eleven  years  of  age.  She  herself  is 
still  in  her  early  thirties.  She  speaks  German, 
French,  Flemish  and  English.     Gently  reared, 


AVALANCHE  101 

she  still  bears  the  tokens  of  her  upbringing. 
She  spoke  coherently  and  in  the  voice  of  cultiva- 
tion. Her  gestures  were  few;  her  voice  was 
low  and  even. 

"I  was,"  she  said,  "the  wife  of  a  leather 
merchant.  We  were  prosperous  and  happy  in 
a  pleasant  home.  That  was  until  the  morning 
of  the  nineteenth  of  August.  Now  it  is  over. 
My  husband  I  have  not  seen  since  the  Germans 
occupied  Aershot. 

"On  that  morning  the  town  was  bombarded 
for  nearly  an  hour  and  a  half  from  nine  o'clock, 
houses  crumbling  to  dust  about  our  own. 
Then  the  Germans  entered.  They  behaved 
like  beasts.  They  dragged  the  inhabitants, 
who  hid  in  their  cellars,  out  into  the  streets  and 
shut  hundreds  of  them  into  the  church  as  pris- 
oners. It  was  then  that  my  husband  disap- 
peared. 

"I  had  sent,  thank  God,  my  children  a  few 
miles*  away  to  Ryckevorscl.  For  myself,  I 
escaped  death  because  I  spoke  German  and  pre- 
tended not  to  be  afraid,  although  how  I 
achieved  that  deception  I  do  not  know,  for  to 


102       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

me  it  seemed  that  I  never  ceased  to  tremble. 
While  seeing  many  of  my  neighbors  shot  in  the 
streets,  I  managed  to  say  that  I  was  a  German, 
and  the  soldiers  at  last  chalked  on  the  door  of 
my  house  the  words : 

"  'A  German  lady,  living  alone.  Save  this 
place  unconditionally.' 

"You  say  that  the  Germans  declare  their 
actions  to  have  been  the  result  of  shooting  on 
the  part  of  the  inhabitants  on  the  evening  after 
the  German  occupation  began.  That  declara- 
tion cannot  be  true,  because  the  Germans  began 
their  butchery  and  devastation  as  soon  as  they 
had  arrived.  They  battered  their  way  into 
the  cellars  where  the  frightened  people  were 
hiding  and  brought  them  out  at  the  bayonet's 
point:  I  saw  them.  They  outraged  women 
and  girls,  they  burned,  stole,  killed.  M.  Hiele- 
mans'  warehouse  held  food  enough  to  feed  the 
town  for  two  years:  they  shipped  it  to  Ger- 
many. My  husband's  warehouse  they  stripped 
clean. 

"House  after  house  they  burned.  In  some 
of  these  I  know  that  there  were  people  ill  and 


AVALANCHE  103 

unable  to  leave.  My  milkmaid  they  murdered ; 
they  shot  dead  a  recently  married  couple,  my 
neighbors.  Nearby,  they  shot  first  a  husband, 
then  his  wife,  then  her  baby.  They  even 
seemed  to  think  that  they  were  merciful,  be- 
cause they  said:  'We  do  not  torture;  we  kill 
outright.' 

"On  the  evening  of  the  nineteenth,  as  I  know 
of  my  own  knowledge,  a  great  body  of  the 
people  of  the  town  were  taken  to  an  open  field 
and  tossed  down  there,  their  arms  bound  behind 
them.  After  they  had  been  left  thus  all  night 
long,  one  in  every  three  of  these  peaceful  folk 
was  called  to  stand  out  and  was  shot,  while 
their  friends  and  relatives  were  forced  to  wit- 
ness the  massacre.  A  hundred  and  sixty-nine 
were  killed.  Those  who  were  left  were  kicked 
and  beaten  out  of  the  town. 

"I  remained  in  Aerschot  after  the  Belgians 
retook  it  and  until  it  was  once  more  taken  by 
the  Germans.  Then  the  Germans  were  worse 
than  they  had  been  at  first.  Before  his  wife's 
eyes  they  shot  the  railroad-station-master; 
near  his  house  they  killed  a  woman  and  her 


104       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

three  months'  old  baby.  I  know  a  man,  once  a 
prosperous  printer,  who  was  compelled  to  look 
on  while  one  of  his  sons  was  shot  and  while 
the  arm  of  another  was  cut  off  in  such  a  man- 
ner that  he  died  of  the  wound.  I  have  heard, 
on  the  best  authority,  that  several  of  our 
priests  were  murdered. 

"What  we  few  survivors  went  through,  I 
cannot  tell  you.  For  two  entire  weeks  we 
scarcely  slept,  and  never  once  during  that  time 
did  we  dare  to  take  our  clothes  off,  or  go  to  bed 
in  the  ordinary  manner." 

She  paused.  She  put  her  slim,  dark  hand  to 
her  forehead:  it  was  almost  the  only  gesture 
that  she  had  employed. 

"Those  things  which  I  remember,"  she  said, 
"I  shall  never  be  able  to  forget.  But  much  I 
have  forgotten.  It  was  too  terrible  to  remem- 
ber.    I  am  not  sorry  that  I  have  forgotten  it." 

Mme.  von  de  Pol  was  not  the  only  Belgian 
that  talked  of  the  murder  of  babies  and  young 
children.  I  heard  of  many  such  atrocities, 
along  with  stories  of  Germans  firing  on  the 
white  flag  and  on  the  Red  Cross,  as  well  as  two 


AVALANCHE  10 


3 


or  three  of  their  use  of  these  and  the  Belgian 
banner  for  luring  detachments  of  the  Belgians 
into  their  clutches.  Here,  however,  I  shall  tell 
but  one,  and  that  because  it  comes  from  an 
American.  His  name  I  am  permitted  only  to 
indicate,  because  his  wife  is  still  suffering  from 
the  shock  of  the  experience  and  further  pub- 
licity would  only  aggravate  that  shock.    I  shall 

therefore  call  him  "Mr.  S "  and  merely  add 

that  he  is  a  man  well  known  and  a  member  of  a 
prominent  New  England  family. ' 

Mr.  S and  his  wife  had  been  motoring 

on  the  Continent  and,  the  war  having  started, 
were  making  through  Belgium  for  the  coast. 
They  had,  as  they  supposed,  all  the  papers 
necessary  for  their  protection.  While  still  in- 
side the  German  lines  in  the  invaded  country, 
they  passed  a  ruined  village  and  overtook  a  boy 
and  a  girl,  aged  about  nine  and  five  years.  The 
children,  weeping,  said  that  their  parents  had 
been  killed  and  that  they  had  fallen  hopelessly 
behind  the  column  of  refugees  hurrying  from 
their  village.     They  had  no  knowledge  of  the 


106       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

whereabouts  of  any  of  their  relatives  or 
friends ;  they  were  hungry  and  penniless.     Mr. 

and  Mrs.  S took  these  waifs  into  their  car. 

At  first  their  only  thought  was  to  deliver  the 
children  to  the  Belgian  authorities  in  some  safe 
town ;  but  soon  the  hapless  condition  of  the  lit- 
tle fugitives,  and  their  simple  and  appealing 
manner,  completely  won  the  Americans'  hearts : 
they  must  be  taken  to  their  rescuers'  own  New 
England  home  and  there  kept,  perhaps  until, 
the  war  over,  some  relative  should  be  dis- 
covered, or,  failing  such  discovery,  for  the  re- 
mainder of  their  lives. 

No  such  outcome  was  to  be.  A  few  miles 
along  the  road,  a  squad  of  German  soldiers 
stopped  the  car.  They  found  the  Americans' 
papers  in  order — but  what  about  the  children? 

Mr.  S explained. 

"They  must  get  out  of  the  car,"  said  the  sol- 
dier in  command. 

The  children  got  out. 

"They  cannot  go  with  you,"  said  the  officer. 

Mr.    S protested.     His   wife   pleaded. 

The   soldier   became   angry;   he   ordered   the 


AVALANCHE  107 

children  shot.  The  sentence  was  immediately 
executed. 

For  my  part,  I  do  not  consider  those  children 
the  most  unhappy  of  the  Belgians.  I  do  not 
consider  the  most  unhappy  of  the  Belgians  the 
murdered  women  and  old  men,  who  died  amid 
the  smoking  ruins  of  their  houses.  The  most 
unhappy  of  the  Belgians  are  the  survivors  of 
this  Teutonic  avalanche:  the  wife  of  the  once 
rich  merchant,  the  widow  of  the  once  contented 
cottager,  the  homeless  old  men  and  women,  the 
children  and  babies  left  alone  in  a  ravished 
country,  the  legions  that  have  been  driven  re- 
sourceless  into  alien  lands,  the  non-combatant 
thousands  who  are  starving  in  that  land  of  their 
own  where,,  but  a  few  months  since,  they  lived 
in  peace  and  plenty.  .  .  . 

What  of  them? 


y 

THE   RED   RAIN    IN   ANTWERP 

There  will  be  small  order  in  this  chapter,  and 
but  little  form,  because  what  I  have  here  to 
describe  is  an  end  of  order ;  it  is  that  enemy  of 
form:  chaos.  Elsewhere  I  have  called  refu- 
gee-flooded Ostend  the  Back-Door  of  Hell ;  but 
even  when  I  left  Ostend  I  did  not  really  believe 
in  Hell. — I  believe  in  it  now;  I  have  been 
there.  .  .  . 

At  first,  after  I  entered  Antwerp,  there  was 
only  one  hint  of  approaching  disaster:  a  dis- 
tant muttering  from  the  south,  as  I  have  heard 
thunder-storms  mutter  over  their  brewing 
wrath  across  Yorkshire  moors.  Ceaselessly,, 
regularly,  stubbornly,  that  far  rumble  pro- 
ceeded, now  and  again  breaking  into  a  single 
sharp  report,  or  rising  to.  a  piercing  scream. 
Away  down  there,  clouds  of  smoke  beat  the 
still    October    air.     Then    the    reports,    the 

108 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      109 

screams,  would  cease;  but  always  the  obligato 
of  those  tremendous  basses  continued. 

In  the  heart  of  the  city,  everything  was  still. 
There  was  a  quiet,  oppressive,  but  orderly. 
The  streets  were  almost  empty,  and  the  shops 
were  closed.  One  store  alone,  it  seemed,  was 
open  for  business,  displaying  placards  from 
the  hands  of  an  amateur  sign-painter,  which 
announced  "bargains  in  cellar-beds" ;  that  is  to 
say,  beds  constructed  for  use  in  the  shallow 
Antwerp  cellars,  where  the  inhabitants  might 
hide  from  the  expected  shell-fire.  But  other- 
wise the  house  fronts  were  rows  of  tombs; 
they  reminded  one  of  a  walk  through  Pere 
Lachaise:  the  doors  barred,  the  shutters  bolted; 
and  it  was  strange  to  pass  along  these  death- 
like thoroughfares  and  see,  fluttering  from  a 
thousand  sealed  fronts,  the  gay  flag  of  Bel- 
gium. 

That  was  not  the  only  flag  in  view:  all  the 
historic  and  public  buildings  flew  the  1  tanner 
of  the  Hague  Convention,  in  order  to  warn  the 
poising  enemy  of  spots  where  even  his  shells 
might  not  fall  with  impunity.     This,  at  a  stiller 


no       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

air-level,  hung  limply;  however,  above  the 
hotel  de  ville  and  trembled,  as  if  asking  for 
mercy,  over  the  fourteenth-century  Gothic  ca- 
thedral, the  jewel  of  the  Low  Countries,  around 
which  circled  a  pair  of  silent  and  watchful  Bel- 
gian aeroplanes. 

Every  little  while,  a  Boy  Scout,  his  som- 
brero pulled  over  his  nose,  his  green  cape  fly- 
ing, would  dart  around  a  corner,  on  government 
service,  as  most  Belgian  Boy  Scouts  were — 
a  messenger,  perhaps,  from  the  school-building 
in  the  Avenue  du  Commerce,  which,  after  the 
flight  from  Brussels,  had  become  the  nation's 
Foreign  Bureau;  a  dispatch-bearer  from  the 
Ministry  of  State,  then  quartered  in  the  Hotel 
St.  Antoine,  or  a  miniature  legate  from  one  of 
the  offices  that  had  taken  refuge  in  the  Grand 
Hotel.  Once  there  passed  a  shovel-hatted 
priest  in  swirling  cassock,  the  Red  Cross  blaz- 
ing on  his  arm  and  about  his  neck  a  necklace 
of  rolls  suspended,  bound  for  the  firing-line. 
In  the  distance,  a  dog-battery  crossed  the 
street's  end,  and  twice  motor-cars  from  the 
Pare  des  Automobiles  Militaires  at  the  steam- 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      in 

ship  docks  shot  across  the  way :  when  war  was 
declared,  the  army  immediately  commandeered 
every  automobile  obtainable,  wiping  all  speed- 
laws  from  the  statute-slate,  and  now  the  mili- 
tary machines  dashed  along  city-thoroughfares 
as  I  have  never  seen  cars  dash  save  in  the  quest 
of  that  modern  grail,  the  Vanderbilt  Cup. 

My  course  lay  through  what  is  usually  the 
busiest  portion  of  the  city  and  along  the  Ave- 
nue de  Keyser  and  the  Place  de  Meir.  In  the 
former  street,  at  other  times  so  merry  with 
its  pavement-cafes,  there  was  scarcely  anybody 
to  be  seen.  In  the  long  mile  which,  through 
happier  times,  had  been  to  Antwerp  what  the 
Strand  is  to  London,  the  Municipal  Banquet- 
ing Hall  was  now  as  dark  as  a  prison ;  the  The- 
atre des  Yarietes,  where  I  had  sat  through  the 
merriest  of  Erench  comedies,  was  become  a 
closed  barn;  the  sole  sign  of  life  was  the  sentry 
pacing  up  and  down  before  the  palace. 

The  last  fortress  of  a  nation,  Antwerp,  until 
a  few  months  since  a  thoroughly  modern  city 
of  four  hundred  thousand  inhabitants,  bad  re- 
turned to  its  mediaeval  order  without  its  me- 


ii2        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

diaeval  grandeur.  Its  southern  suburbs  had 
been  obliterated  to  make  place  for  miles  upon 
miles  of  trenches,  pits,  barbed-wire  entangle- 
ments. Its  richest  citizens  and  its  most  pros- 
perous tradesmen  had  become  paupers.  Un- 
der martial-law,  its  cafes  were  all  but  closed; 
since  the  Zeppelin  attack  in  August,  its  elec- 
tric-lighting system  had  been  out  of  commis- 
sion, and  all  other  illumination  was  shut  off 
nightly  at  eight  o'clock,  when  the  street-cars 
ceased  running.  Letters  addressed  to  any 
country  save  France,  Russia  or  England  had 
to  be  posted  unsealed;  scarcely  any  personal 
telegrams  could  leave  or  enter;  the  telephone 
could  be  used  only  for  governmental  or  mili- 
tary purposes.  All  sale  of  spirits  was  forbid- 
den. Now,  a  German  shell  having  destroyed 
the  municipal  water-plant  at  Lierre,  water  was 
a  luxury. 

Yet  this  city  was  once  the  busiest  in  the 
world,  surpassing  even  Venice  and  Genoa:  in 
the  days  when  Antwerp  sent  the  largest  ships 
over  all  the  Seven  Seas,  and  Antwerp's  fair 
was  the  greatest  of  all  earth's  markets,  Flem- 


Cop\r  I  II  IcrurouJ  .' 

A.MU  i 

"It  was  Iiar<l  to  believe  her  doomed,  .  .  .  this  home  of  <K-  Vos  and 
Quinten  Mai  j  ,  ol  both  the  Teniei  i,  and  Van  I  >y<  k." 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      113 

ish  rugs  were  sold  in  Persia  and  Flemish  pray- 
er-mats to  the  Turk.  It  was  hard  to  believe 
her  doomed  at  last,  this  home  of  de  Vos  and 
Ouinten  Matsys,  of  Seghers,  Jordaens,  both 
the  Teniers  and  Van  Dyck.  Just  around  that 
deserted  corner  remained  the  house  in  which 
Rubens  lived  and  died.  Godfrey  de  Bouillon 
had  been  margrave  here;  this  stronghold  had 
suffered  eight  sieges;  the  Northmen  burnt  it; 
the  still-remembered  Furie  Espagnolc  swept 
across  its  walls ;  Alexander  of  Parma  for  four- 
teen months  invested  it;  Carnot  tried  to  hold 
it  in  the  War  of  Liberation;  the  Dutch  bom- 
barded it  during  the- revolution  of  1830,  and  the 
French  in  1S32;  Brialmont,  in  the  middle  eight- 
een-hundreds,  made  it  "the  best  fortification  in 
Europe." 

Hard  indeed  to  believe  it  was  doomed  at  last : 
too  hard  for  many  an  inhabitant,  who  was  soon 
to  pay  heavily  for  his  inability  to  doubt  those 
engineering  feats  of  Brialmont.  Until  the 
last  two  days  of  the  siege,  belief  would  not 
waver.  Outside,  their  ranks  decimated  by 
a  rain  of  explosives  from  guns  beyond  range 


ii4       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

of  all  reply,  the  little  Belgian  army  lay  face  to 
face  with  death;  its  men  had  fought  for  days 
without  resting;  many  of  them  had  been  hur- 
ried from  Liege  and  Malines  and  brought  by 
boat  to  Antwerp;  the  ambulance-service  was 
crippled;  the  field-hospitals  overflowed;  the 
dead  were  unburied.  Nevertheless,  the  citizens 
of  Antwerp,  inside  its  walls,  continued  firm. 
Had  not  all  the  military-experts  in  the  world 
pronounced  their  town  impregnable?  Up  to 
the  morning  of  that  fatal  Wednesday,  the  pop- 
ulation believed  in  their  fortifications  as  truly 
as  the  passengers  on  the  Titanic  believed  in 
the  security  of  their  ice-shattered  steamer. 

The  new  turn  of  opinion  was  first  voiced  by 
that  mighty  gossip,  the  man  at  whose  house  I 
was  to  stop. 

"The  end  is  sure  soon  to  arrive,"  he  de- 
clared. "Von  Besler,  one  of  the  German  gen- 
erals, sent  word  of  it  to-day.  He  told  the  neu- 
tral ministers  to  bid  us  be  ready,  and  Deguise, 
our  Military  Commandant,  warned  all  to  go 
who  feared  to  die.  Thousands" — he  nodded 
over  his  shoulder — "are  streaming  out  of  the 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      115 

city  now:  that  part  of  the  town  is  not  quiet,  I 
assure  you." 

"And  how  do  the  rest  of  the  people  think  it 
will  end?" 

He  shook  his  head: 

"The  Communal  Council  has  unanimously 
voted  that  we  resist  till  the  last  day.  But  this 
is  the  end.  The  Allies?  Poof!  It  seems  that 
they  .have  their  hands  full  over  the  border, 
those  allies.  To-night  will  witness  well  the 
start  of  the  termination." 

He  was  as  certain  of  it  as  I  was.  This 
morning,  he  had  heard,  the  Germans  had  put 
into  position  their  tremendous  forty-two  cen- 
timeter guns,  the  mere  appearance  of  which 
had  brought  about  the  capitulation  of  Mau- 
beuge.  Both  of  us  momentarily  expected  to 
hear  them :  we  were  destined  not  to  hear  them 
until  Thursday  night. 

"Last  evening,"  chattered  my  host,  "shells 
wrecked  a  church  in  the  outskirts,  and  one  shell 
descended  in  the  rue  Yolk.  People  said  that 
the  wild  beasts  in  the  Zoological  Gardens  had 
escaped  their  broken  cages.     That  was  false, 


n6       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

but  this  afternoon  the  attendants  were  killing 
the  lions  and  tigers.  To-night  the  enemy  be- 
gin in  earnest.  My  faith,  if  they  chose,  they 
could  reach  us  now !" 

He  was  full  of  this  sort  of  gossip:  Prince 
Rupprecht  of  Bavaria,  brother-in-law  to  the 
Belgian  Queen,  was  with  the  besiegers;  the 
Americans'  efforts  to  save  the  cathedral  would 
be  futile,  for  though  the  Germans  had  been 
given  a  map  with  Antwerp's  public  buildings 
plainly  marked,  they  had  said  that  they  had  a 
right  to  direct  their  fire  especially  against  such 
places  in  order  to  terrify  the  population  into 
demanding  a  surrender. 

"It  is  allowed  by  international  law,"  he  said. 

Small  bodies  of  troops  were  now  almost  the 
only  people  to  be  seen  moving  through  the 
streets,  and  there  passed  us,  with  heads  erect 
and  faces  set,  a  company  of  infantry  of  which 
the  oldest  soldier  could  not  have  been  more 
than  nineteen :  the  last  scrapings  of  the  military 
net,  these  boys  that  had  never  yet  placed  finger 
to  trigger  must  be  tossed  before  that  onrush  of 
German  veterans. 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      117 

A  covered  wagon  rattled  by,  going  in  the 
opposite  direction.  Erom  a  careless  corner 
two  pairs  of  bare  feet  extended,  still  upward 
pointing,  jolting  horribly  with  every  jolt  of  the 
vehicle. 

"Dead  from  a  military  hospital,"  said  my 
friend. 

"But  the  feet — why  are  they  bare?" 

He  shrugged. 

"That  is  the  order;  it  is  necessary.  Boots 
are  valuable;  the  living  need  them,  and  the 
dead  do  not  walk." 

Above,  a  long,  graceful  arc  of  pale  smoke, 
the  track  of  a  shell,  was  lazily  dispersing,  and 
southward  soared  a  black  observation  Taube, 
the  petrel  that  foretells  the  storm.  What 
could  that  airman  be  thinking  of  the  little  peo- 
ple below  him  as,  a  destroying  angel  hesitant,  he 
gazed  down  on  the  city  that  from  his  elevation 
must  have  seemed  a  gigantic  chessboard  on 
which  the  pawns  had  gone  mad:  a  medley  of 
1  icant i fnl  but  tiny  buildings  and  delicate  spires 
and,  under  the  shadow  of  those  nearest  the 
avenues  of  escape,  columns  of  whirling  dust — 


n8       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

animated  dust,  stricken  human  beings,  scram- 
bling for  their  lives  along  the  few  outlets  be- 
neath a  smiling  sky. 

Something  of  that  scramble  I  saw  later  in 
the  afternoon.  It  was  the  spectacle  that  I  had 
seen  before  at  Ostend,  but  on  a  larger  scale. 
I  had  heard  from  Amsterdam  that  half  a  mil- 
lion fugitive  Belgian  non-combatants  were  al- 
ready in  Holland,  and  that  every  Dutch  train 
from  the  frontier  was  groaning  under  more. 
I  had  been  told  that  the  fortv  miles  of  road  to 
Ghent  were  already  packed  with  refugees.  I 
knew  that  all  the  boats  for  England  were  over- 
laden and  that — the  west  Belgian  railways, 
like  the  entire  Belgian  telegraph-system,  hav- 
ing at  last  been  preempted  for  military  uses — 
all  the  highways  were  filling  with  the  fleeing 
throng.  "From  our  towers,"  said  an  old  sac- 
ristan of  the  cathedral,  "every  smallest  path 
out  of  the  city  and  away  from  the  Germans 
looks  as  if  it  were  a  great  black  snake  wrig- 
gling forward."  Antwerp,  I  was  informed, 
had  already  sent  twenty-five  thousand  of  its 
own  citizens  to  Rosendaal,  or  through  it,  and 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      119 

now  this  outpouring,  beginning  at  dawn  and 
recalling  the  pictures  of  the  flights  of  Tartar 
tribes,  continued  without  abatement.  Into 
that  falling  "strongest  fortress  of  Europe"  had 
streamed  for  shelter  the  entire  surviving  popu- 
lation of  its  outlying  towns  and  countryside; 
out  of  it  these  again  were  streaming,  these 
and,  as  it  seemed,  the  rest  of  the  people  of 
Antwerp  itself:  six  hundred  thousand  souls. 

Once,  long  ago,  I  sat  high  on  a  tree-limb  near 
the  edge  of  a  Colorado  forest  and  saw,  pass- 
ing under  me,  the  creatures  of  the  primaeval 
woods  running  away  from  a  forest-fire.  All 
the  native  animosities  of  the  bush  were  for- 
gotten; all  the  differences  of  genus  and  species, 
the  natural  antipathies,  the  ages-old  feuds,  the 
primordial  blood-lusts  were  lost  sight  of;  the 
beast  of  prey  trotted  harmless  beside  its  tra- 
ditional victim;  every  instinct  of  contention 
was  submerged  in  the  instinct  of  flight  from 
an  elemental  foe.  What  I  saw  on  this  after- 
noon in  Antwerp  as  much  resembled  that  in 
kind  as  it  was  greater  in  numbers  and  degree. 

Most   of   the    fugitives    sought    escape   by 


120        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

water,  and  the  multitudes  jammed  and  dammed 
every  street  leading  to  the  quays,  every 
crooked  alley  that  ran  toward  the  north  and 
west.  The  river  resembled  a  Chinese  city's 
water-front  on  the  festival-day  of  an  Oriental 
river-god;  it  was  dark  with  all  conceivable 
sorts  of  craft,  each  laden  far  beyond  the  dan- 
ger-point with  little  children  and  frail  women, 
with  the  crippled  and  the  old;  the  boats  of  a 
hundred  descriptions  bumped  and  collided;  it 
would  have  been  possible  to  walk  miles  about 
the  river's  surface  dry-shod. 

Many  of  the  very  rich  had  long  ago  fled  from 
their  villas  at  Eeckeren  and  Cappellen  in  their 
motor-cars,  returning  the  cars  for  government- 
uses  from  the  border.  Now,  in  the  city  proper, 
porters  there  were  none,  and  cabs  were  so  rare 
as  to  fetch,  at  sale,  the  prices  of  Amsterdam's 
best  diamonds;  so  that  one  saw  well-to-do 
heads  of  families  staggering  under  the  weight 
of  trunks,  their  wives  limping  along  with 
heavy  satchels  in  their  hands,  and  their  chil- 
dren dragging  bulged  canvas-bags  through  the 
dirt.     Often  these  people  begged  a  lift  in  the 


THE  RED  RAIX  IN  ANTWERP      121 

ramshackle  cart  of  some  farmer  escaping  from 
a  burning-  village.  Social  distinctions  were 
trampled  under  foot,  and  the  distinctions  of 
mere  wealth  had  practically  ceased  to  exist. 
There  were  a  few  lucky  people  in  carriages, 
more  in  what  had  once  been  the  delivery-wag- 
ons of  their  thriving  shops ;  some  were  mounted 
on  mules,  on  horses,  on  bicycles. 

The  poorer  folk  proceeded  with  push-carts 
before  them,  in  much  the  manner  in  which  the 
Mormons  crossed  our  American  prairies,  the 
carts  heaped  high  with  a  jumble  of  household 
goods  and  sometimes  a  baby  or  two  tied  on  top. 
A  lame  boy  was  trundling  his  paralytic  mother 
in  an  invalid's  chair,  and  there  was  a  scattering 
of  perambulators  loaded,  until  their  springs 
cracked,  with  any  freight  save  that  for  which 
they  were  intended.  I  saw  a  group  of  women 
draw  itself  from  the  mass  and  surround  and 
screen  another  woman,  fallen  to  the  ground:  a 
new  life  was  coming  into  the  world  among 
these  thousands  fleeing  for  their  lives — subse- 
quently,  T   heard   of  sixteen   similar  instances 

urring    that    day    among    the    tremendous 


122       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

crowds  that  trudged  along  the  road  to  the 
Dutch  frontier.  There  was  but  little  jostling, 
and  I  noticed  no  fighting;  but  the  men  swore, 
the  women  sobbed,  the  children  whimpered, 
and  all  the  while,  from  the  black  south,  there 
came  the  stubborn  rumble  of  that  malign  thun- 
derstorm, ever  seeming  to  press  closer  and 
closer,  ever  threatening  to  break  over  the  lag- 
gards among  the  runaways'  crippled  rear- 
guard. 

I  heard  a  barefoot  woman  of  the  fields  asking 
in  French  for  a  few  centimes  from  an  old  man 
in  a  frock-coat  and  silk-hat,  who  was  being 
driven  in  an  open  carriage  at  the  snail's  pace 
made  necessary  by  the  congestion  of  the  street. 

"I  have  only  the  clothes  on  my  back,"  he  an- 
swered. "I  lost  my  all  when  my  house  and 
factory  were  burned  at  Dinant.  To-day  I  have 
given  this  driver  all  the  money  that  I  have  left 
in  the  world  to  drive  me  to- the  frontier." 

The  driver  confirmed  this  by  a  stolid  nod. 
He  gave  the  woman  a  franc. 

Night  had  fallen  by  the  time  I  returned  to  the 
house :  a  cold  night,  but  clear  and  full  of  stars 


THE  RED  RAIX  IN  ANTWERP      123 

of  which  the  pale  radiance  would  every  little 
while  be  dimmed  by  the  penetrating  search- 
lights from  the  river-forts  as  they  Hashed  their 
dancing  shafts  across  the  darkened  city. 

"I  think,"  said  I,  "that  I  shall  go  to  bed 
early." 

My  host  regarded  me  as  if  I  were  not  quite 
sane. 

"Go  to  bed?''  he  repeated.  "Then  you  will 
be  the  only  sound  human  being  in  Antwerp  that 
does." 

I  have  no  doubt  but  that  he  was  almost  liter- 
ally correct,  yet  I  held  to  my  purpose.  There 
was  not  any  bravado  about  it:  I  had  had  no 
sleep  on  my  way  here,  and,  had  he  clapped  a 
pistol  to  my  head,  I  should  nevertheless  have 
speedily  been  nodding.  So  I  made  him  amazedly 
show  me  my  way  upstairs,  where  I  kicked  off  my 
boots,  lay  down  in  a  fourposter  and,  wrapped 
in  my  own  blanket,  was  soon  unconscious. 

Soon,  but  not  long.  In  spite  of  my  utter 
weariness,  my  sleep  became  fitful.  Once  a 
searchlight's  ray  flashed  bluely  in  at  the  win- 
dow  and   across   my   face   and   wakened   me. 


124       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Then  a  dog  howled,  whom,  shortly,  a  verita- 
ble chorus  echoed.  It  seemed  that  this  had 
scarcely  at  length  subsided  before  there  came, 
not  localized,  but  as  if  from  over  the  entire 
city,  a  great  panting  breath,  regularly  drawn, 
as  of  some  wounded  monster  of  the  earliest 
world.  I  remembered  Zola's  account  of 
Sedan  on  the  eve  of  "La  Debacle."  Out  of 
the  streets  there  rose  mingled  sounds  and 
muffled,  sounds  incomplete,  mournful :  the  trot 
of  distant  cavalry,  the  roll  of  drums,  the  tramp 
of  marching  men,  and,  far  away,  the  mutter- 
ing of  the  approaching  storm.  .  .  . 

A  loud  explosion  wakened  me.  I  jumped 
out  of  bed  while  the  glass  from  the  window 
tinkled  at  my  feet.  Another  explosion  fol- 
lowed as  I  was  drawing  on  my  boots,  and,  I 
think,  a  third.  In  that  moment,  the  sound  of 
my  host,  beating  with  both  fists  on  my  bed- 
room door,  was  scarcely  louder  than  the  crack- 
ling of  logs  on  a  hearth. 

"The  Zeppelins!"  he  gasped  as  I  admitted 
him.     "Again  the  Zeppelins !" 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      125 

There  may  or  may  not  have  been  Zeppelins : 
my  informant,  at  any  rate,  declared  that  he 
had  heard  four  bombs  from  them.  They  had 
passed  close  at  hand,  just  over  the  southern 
portion  of  the  city.  One  thing-  was  certain: 
here,  in  whatever  manner,  was  what  he  had 
called  "the  start  of  the  termination." 

We  ran  downstairs :  it  were  more  correct  to 
say  that  we  fell  down.  As  a  heavier  man,  I 
fell  the  faster  and,  on  landing,  began  to  fumble 
with  the  knob  of  the  street-door. 

"Not  that  way!  Not  that  way!"  called  my 
host.  "Have  you  indeed  lost  your  senses? 
That  door  leads  to  the  open  air." 

"I  know  it,"  I  said.     "I—" 

"But  the  cellar — it  is  to  the  cellar  that  we 
must  go!  There  alone  is  any  portion  of  pro- 
tection." 

Several  men  that  ought  to  know — among 
them,  Mr.  Guy  Whitlock,  who  is  a  lieutenant 
in  the  navy  and  understands  more  about  shell- 
fire  than  I  hope  ever  to  master — have  since  told 
me  that,  in  a  long-continued  bombardment, 
they  would  prefer,  for  its  chances  of  safety, 


126       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

an  open  park  to  the  cellar  of  a  house,  and,  in 
most  of  the  cases  that  I  have  met  with,  impulse 
backs  this  no  doubt  reasoned  decision.  To  flee 
to  the  cellars  at  the  first  sign  of  a  real  bom- 
bardment had,  however,  been  the  advice  beaten 
into  every  non-combatant's  head  by  the  mallet 
of  Belgian  authority  since  the  war  began,  and, 
now  that  this  advice  was  recalled  to  me,  it  as- 
sumed complete  possession  of  my  mind. 
Moreover,  I  confess  without  shame  that  my  up- 
permost impulse  now  immediately  became  one 
to  creep  as  deep  into  the  earth  as  I  could  go — 
an  impulse  that  returned  more  than  once  dur- 
ing that  night  and  the  day  that  followed  it. 
But  I  reflected  that,  if  all  prognostications  were 
true,  I  was  probably  in  for  a  part  of  the 
heaviest  bombardment  that  any  city  has  ever 
known  since  cannon  were  invented,  and  that  to 
go  belowstairs  would  be  to  miss  seeing  a  bit  of 
something  that  no  man  had  ever  seen  before. 
I  certainly  was  afraid  to  go  into  the  street — 
very  badly  afraid  indeed — but,  I  argued  with 
myself,  and  aloud  to  my  companion,  that  we 
should  really  be  safer  there  than  under  a  house 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      127 

the  whole  weight  of  which  might  at  any  instant 
be  precipitated  upon  us. 

He  was  not  convinced.  He  had  seen  more 
of  bombardments  than  I  had,  and  his  expe- 
rience inclined  him  to  the  opinion  opposed  to 
that  which  I  later  heard  Mr.  \\  nitlock  express. 

"You  forget  the  bits  of  shell  and  the  flying 
pieces  of  tile  and  chimney,"  he  warned  me. 

Nevertheless  I  converted  myself;  and  he, 
though  by  no  means  converted,  would  not  let  me 
fare  forth  alone.  Besides,  he  said,  he  was  "of 
a  curiosity  notorious":  he  would  go  out  with 
me. 

I  offered  him  the  second  of  my  automatics. 

He  refused  it. 

"To  what  use?"'  he  sufficiently  demanded. 
"To  shoot  the  sky?" 

He  flung  wide  the  door. 

Over  the  black  housetops  on  our  right,  in  the 
direction  of  the  Avenue  de  l'lndustrie,  a  crown 
of  flames  was  rising  into  the  air:  the  Falais  de 
Justice,  we  were  later  told,  struck  by  one  of  the 
bomb  .  In  the  southwest,  another  glow, 
wavering,  but  far  broader,  came,  as  we  learned, 


128       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

from  the  petroleum  tanks  at  Hoboken.  We 
were  standing  in  a  wild  uncertainty  when  two 
more  explosions  resounded,  one  close  upon  the 
other  and  both  from  the  south.  Then,  with  a 
mounting  shriek,  a  shell  burst  over  that  por- 
tion of  the  town.  The  noise  seemed  to  shat- 
ter all  that  remained  of  the  rightful  silence  of 
night.  Another  shriek  followed  and  another. 
They  were  the  opening  notes'  of  the  great  bom- 
bardment. 

I  remember  looking  at  my  watch  by  the  light 
of  my  electric-torch.  Something  had  happened 
to  it;  it  was  going  at  an  amazing  rate;  but  it 
showed  exactly  thirty-six  minutes  after 
eleven.1 

In  many  parts  of  the  city,  perhaps  in  most 
of  it,  the  remaining  population  heeded  the  of- 
ficial advice  and  fled  to  their  cellars — already 

1 1  am  precise  about  this,  because  I  have  since  heard  that 
there  is  considerable  difference  of  opinion  as  to  the  hour 
at  which  the  bombardment  started.  Mr.  Powell,  who  is  far 
and  away  the  most  trustworthy  authority  and  seems  to  have 
kept  his  head  throughout  all  the  horrors  of  Antwerp's  fall, 
sets  the  time  as  "about  ten  p.  m."  The  German  official  re- 
ports, on  the  other  hand,  set  it  at  midnight.  My  watch  was  a 
wrist-watch,  and  I  had  taken  it  off  when  I  lay  down.  On 
jumping  out  of  bed,  I  knocked  it  from  pillow  to  floor,  and  it 
had  subsequently  to  be  thoroughly  repaired.  Some  time  it 
certainly  gained  on  that  night  before  I  thought  to  consult  it; 
but  even  this  did  not  bring  it  up  to  the  German  calculation. 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      129 

fitted  out,  with  food  and  bedding',  against  such 
a  contingency — and  there  stayed  until  the  end 
of  the  bombardment,  or  until  such  time  as  they 
joined  the  last  rush  of  those  who  escaped  from 
Antwerp  before  the  Germans  entered.  At  a 
later  hour,  I  passed  through  streets  after 
streets  that  were  like  those  of  a  formerly  de- 
vastated town  enduring  a  second  devastation 
after  its  people  were  dead  and  buried.  Again, 
I  saw,  on  that  night  as  well  as  during  its  suc- 
cessor, crowds  run  out  of  their  cellars  and  make 
for  the  free  exits  from  the  city;  once,  during  a 
lull  in  the  firing,  I  heard  the  rattle  of  their  run- 
ning feet  in  the  thoroughfare  next  me,  while 
that  in  which  I  stood  was  empty.  But  at  this 
first  moment,  and  in  the  part  of  Antwerp  in 
which  I  then  was,  those  streets  which  had  been 
so  deserted  by  day  were  filled  with  darting  fig- 
ures :  anxious  men  and  frightened  women  fol- 
lowing that  instinct  of  civilization  which,  at 
whatever  inconvenience,  even  through  what- 
ever dangers,  impels  one  toward  a  fire.  The 
police  did  not  interfere,  nor  did  any  sentries; 
nobody  hindered  us,  save  as  we  blindly  hin- 


130       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

dered  one  another.  On  all  lips  were  the  same 
questions : 

"Where  is  it? — Were  there  Zeppelins? — 
How  many? — What  was  hit? — Has  the  bom- 
bardment begun?'' 

And,  equally  ignorant  though  they  were,  all 
answered  with  haphazard  conviction :  it  was  the 
Ecole  Normale,  the  Synagogue  on  the  Avenue 
du  Sud,  and  the  Institut  de  Commerce;  there 
had  been  a  score  of  Zeppelins;  shells  had  fallen 
on  the  Engineers'  Barracks;  now  they  were 
coming  farther  and  farther  into  the  city;  three 
had  exploded  close  by  the  United  States  Con- 
sulate ;  one  had  torn  the  facade  from  the  Hos- 
pital for  the  Aged ;  the  bombardment  had  been 
going  on  for  an  hour ! 

That  state  of  mind  was  to  be  expected ;  it  was 
the  fruit  of  existing  conditions.  All  the  sepa- 
rate trifles  which  composed  the  mosaic  of  these 
people's  accustomed  existence  had  been  plucked 
from  their  pattern;  a  few  days  ago  the  whole 
order  of  their  life  had  suddenly  stopped. 
There  were  no  street-cars,  no  electric-lights,  no 
telephones,    telegraphs,    postal-arrangements, 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      131 

banks ;  there  was  no  work,  no  play  and  no  com- 
munication with  the  outside  world.  Men, 
women  and  children,  they  now  found  them- 
selves shut  in  a  dead  city  with  a  volcano  vomit- 
ing overhead. 

On  a  run,  bumping,  stumbling  over  unseen 
impediments  into  unguessed  gutters,  my  friend 
and  I  forged  our  jostling  way  toward  the  near- 
est glow.  It  grew  brighter  with  every  second, 
and  with  every  second  the  shrieks  of  the  shells 
increased,  redoubling  their  numbers  and  in- 
tensity, until  they  seemed  to  be  tearing  out  our 
brains. 

We  crossed  the  Avenue  du  Sud :  flames  were 
indeed  coming  from  a  building  that  must  have 
been  the  law-courts.  Ahead  of  us,  in  the  rue 
des  Feintres,  other  flames,  but  as  yet  fainter, 
were  licking  at  the  Musce  Royal  that  houses 
the  best  collection  of  Old  Masters  in  the  Low 
Countries.  I  found  myself  laughing  hysteri- 
cally : 

"In  a  room  on  the  ground-floor  over  there" 
— T  pointed — "T  remember  a  statue  by  Cha- 
trousse  called  'Fellow-feeling' :  it's  the  statue  of 


132       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

a  French  soldier  and  a  German  soldier  turned 
friends!" 

We  passed  on.  We  passed  a  house  that 
somebody  said  had  been  struck  by  one  of  the 
Zeppelin  bombs :  the  top  floors  had  been  ground 
to  dust  and  poured  through  those  beneath  them. 

At  the  next  corner  we  were  knocked  down  by 
a  rush  of  people  coming  from  the  opposite  di- 
rection, running  away  from  the  shots  that  had 
already  destroyed  their  homes.  Some  one — in 
that  rush  I  could  not  make  out  whether  he  was 
a  gendarme  or  a  member  of  the  Garde  Civique 
— hurried  by. 

"To  the  cellars !"  he  shouted.  "Get  into  the 
cellars !" 

A  few  of  us  may  have  heeded  him ;  the  ma- 
jority ran  on.  I  saw  him  overturned  by  the 
tide  that  he  had  tried  to  stem.  Directly  before 
us,  the  Hippodrome  appeared  to  be  exhaling 
fire.  Temporarily  exhausted,  more  by  the 
noise  than  by  our  exertions,  we  sank  on  the 
pavement  against  a  house-wall,  and  I  began  to 
count  the  shells :  they  were  exploding,  as  nearly 
as  I  could  calculate,  at  the  rate  of  five  to  the 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP.      133 

minute.  The  concussions  rattled  the  tiles, 
toppled  chimney-pots,  shook  houses  like  an 
earthquake.  Every  man  present  thought  he 
heard  the  forty-two  centimeter  guns ;  but  just 
then  none  did  hear  them:  they  were  reserved 
for  a  final  horror. 

I  had  felt  no  sting,  but,  now  that  I  was  at 
partial  rest,  J  became  aware  of  a  dampness  on 
my  forehead.  I  touched  it  and  then  looked  at 
my  fingers  in  the  flare  of  the  next  explosion: 
blood.     Something  had  just  nicked  my  scalp. 

"I've  been  hit,"  I  said  tragically. 

My  friend  grunted. 

-'Never  mind,"  said  he;  "you  were  getting 
bald  at  all  events." 

I  do  not  know  how  long  we  sat  there.  I  re- 
member that  my  head  so  ached  from  the  noise 
that  the  imminent  prospect  of  having  it  blown 
off  did  not  greatly  alarm  me.  It  must  have 
been  at  one  o'clock  in  the  morning  that  a  redder 
red  sprang  up  a  few  blocks  below  us,  and,  mak- 
ing toward  it,  we  discovered  that  the  new  south- 
station  of  the  Antwerp- Alost  line  was  being  de- 
stroyed.    Then  a  great  double'  chrysanthemum 


134       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

of  fire  opened  in  the  sky  beyond  the  Pepiniere, 
and  a  shout  was  raised  that  the  entire  Berchem 
district  was  in  flames.  I  believe  we  covered  the 
distance  in  fifteen  minutes. 

I  saw  the  great  Baltimore  fire :  it  was  a  terri- 
ble thing,  but,  lacking  the  shrapnel,  it  seemed  a 
child's  bonfire  to  this.  To  our  startled  eyes, 
the  whole  district  appeared  as  a  furnace  filled 
with  vaulting  flames  and  bellowing  smoke,  shot 
through  by  draughts  of  sparks  and  riddled  by 
howling  shells.  The  noise  and  the  effect  of 
those  shots  hurtling  above  and  about  us  was 
like  nothing  so  much  as  it  would  be  to  stand  in 
the  center  of  the  closest-built  portion  of  New 
York's  Second  Avenue  with  the  houses  in 
flames  on  either  hand  and,  overhead,  two  rush- 
ing trains  passing  each  other  with  a  deafening 
clatter  and  hurling  hot  iron  below — indeed,  the 
shell-sounds  resembled  uncommonly  the  noise 
of  the  elevated;  but  here,  combined  in  one 
dreadful  uproar  with  the  flight  and  bursting  of 
the  projectiles,  were  the  noises  of  the  tumbling 
walls,  the  cries  of  the  dispossessed  and  the 
yells  of  the  wounded  and  dying. 


THE  RED  RAIX  IN  ANTWERP      135 

The  heat  "blistered  our  faces,  singed  our  hair ; 
the  tumult  of  the  flames  was  like  the  breakers 
on  a  rocky  coast,  and  the  noise  of  the  explo- 
sions deafened.  Every  little  while,  a  house 
that,  a  moment  since,  stood  intact  would,  as  if 
of  its  own  volition,  belch  forth  a  sheet  of  fire ; 
an  instant  later,  its  neighbor  would  collapse 
amid  a  hail  of  stones  and  a  throat-filling  cloud 
of  mortar.  Parties  of  squealing  women  and 
of  men  shouting  and  sweating  plunged  through 
the  incandescent  mist,  their  heads  low,  their 
hands  before  their  blackened  faces.  Under  the 
choking  scent  of  burning  wood  and  powder,  the 
superheated  atmosphere  held,  now  and  again, 
another  odor,  which  sickened:  the  odor  of  hu- 
man flesh  frying  in  its  own  fat.  For  intermin- 
able moments  the  soot  would  blind  us  and  the 
noise  stupefy;  we  helpless  onlookers  could 
neither  see  nor  hear  one  another:  each  soul 
seemed  alone  in  a  universal  and  cataclysmic 
Hell.  .  .  . 

It  was  close  upon  two  o'clock  when  the  bom- 
bardment shifted  its  objective,  and  the  iron 
Central  Station  suffered.     Directly  in  front  of 


136       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

that  building,  with  shells  tearing  up  the  paving 
all  about  him,  a  man  sat  on  a  trunk  and  was 
saying  over  and  over  again: 

"Berchem  is  burnt — all  Berchem — but  two 
steamers  leave  for  Ostend  in  the  morning." 

It  was  from  this  station  that  a  squad  of  sol- 
diers finally  ordered  us  home;  but  my  friend 
refused  to  go  until  he  had  some  information 
from  them.  Would  Antwerp  be  destroyed? 
He  frankly  proposed  not  to  believe  their  an- 
swer, but  he  would  rather  be  shot  immediately 
than  go  away  without  securing  it. 

Probably  the  corporal  in  charge  was  by  this 
time  used  to  madmen. 

"If  it  is  destroyed,"  said  he,  "the  Germans 
will  be  no  better  off,  for  they  would  need  a 
large  garrison  here,  while  our  troops  could 
then  join  with  the  main  army  of  the  French 
arid  English.' ' 

My  friend  snorted. 

"What  of  that?"  he  demanded.  "Where 
will  our  houses  be  by  that  time?" 

All  the  while  we  were  indoors,  the  ear- 
piercing  bombardment,  which  none  would  have 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      137 

believed  could  become  heavier,  grew  more  and 
more  intense.  It  was  like  the  long-drawn-out 
finale  of  some  horrible  and  titanic  symphony 
wherein  the  hideous  music  climbed  higher  and 
higher,  note  upon  intolerable  note,  beyond  all 
human  dreaming.  When,  by  day,  I  again  re- 
turned to  the  street,  it  was  to  see  only  what  I 
had  already  seen,  hear  what  I  had  already 
heard :  fortunately  there  was  no  wind,  but  the 
rue  du  Roi  was  burning,  the  rue  du  Prince,  the 
rue  Eronberg,  the  avenue  Margrave  and  the 
avenue  Tournhout  were  in  flames.  Some  said 
that  the  police  had  emptied  the  oil-tanks  before 
their  ignition;  others  that  the  burning  oil  was 
flowing  down  the  river  toward  the  pontoon- 
bridge,  which  was  the  only  way  of  escape  to  the 
east.  There  was  no  daylight :  there  was  merely 
a  twilight  of  acrid  smoke  through  which  flames 
roared  and  shrapnel  screeched. 

'They  have  two  hundred  guns  at  work,"  a 
limping  soldier  told  me:  "twenty-eights  and 
thirties.  Out  there" — he  waved  his  hand  to 
indicate  the  inner  line  of  forts — "it  is  a  slaugh- 
ter-house." 


138       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

I  hurried  on,  this  time  alone.  The  once 
splendid  Avenue  des  Arts  was  full  of  broken 
masonry.  For  one  moment  the  zenith  cleared : 
at  my  feet  lay  the  bodies  of  two  women  and  a 
child,  bloody  and  contorted;  the  face  of  one 
was  a  red  pulp,  and  about  it  circled  a  spiral  of 
flies ;  overhead  the  air  was  balmy,  the  sun  high 
and  warm,  the  blue  sky  burdened  with  a  lumin- 
ous peace.  Then  the  dark  horizon  climbed  up- 
ward, hid  the  housetops,  blotted  out  the  heavens 
and  coffined  me  in  the  ruined  street. 

The  cathedral  was  still  safe,  though  one  of 
the  shells,  which  were  now  carrying  all  the 
way  to  the  Scheldt,  had  fallen  in  the  Place 
Verte  that  faces  it,  and  a  cafe  across  from  this 
had  been  injured.  But  the  cathedral  was 
lucky.  The  southern  thoroughfares  especially 
looked  as  if  there  had  been  a  revolution  and 
men  had  died  upon  the  barricades.  Heaps  of 
crumbled  stones  had  been  tossed  across  them; 
electric-light  wires  curled  from  curb  to  curb; 
here  and  there  a  vast  hole  yawning  in  the  rows 
of  buildings,  like  that  of  a  tooth  knocked  out 
from  a  set  otherwise  perfect,  told  how  a  single 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      139 

house  had  been  battered  out  of  existence;  again 
a  whole  row  of  houses  was  reduced  to  such  a 
cluttered  heap  of  debris  that  the  very  street 
lines  were  obliterated.  One  place  had  been 
clipped  clean  of  its  top  floor;  two  sides  of  a 
room  had  been  beaten  out  in  another.  Bodies 
of  the  innocent  dead  became  a  sight  more  fre- 
quent, horribly  mutilated.  .  .  . 

I  went  again  northward.  I  had  thought,  ten 
hours  ago,  that  all  Belgium  was  being  emptied; 
but  throughout  this  day  also  the  stream  of 
refugees  continued.  The  withdrawal  of  the 
garrison  had  begun,  and  columns  of  wounded 
and  exhausted  soldiers  were  marching  across 
the  city  and  toward  the  pontoon-bridge — regi- 
ment after  decimated  regiment  of  men  that 
moved  as  if  they  were  so  many  exhausted  au- 
tomata, staggering,  their  eyes  staring,  their 
faces  black  with  powder,  their  early  nineteenth- 
century  uniforms  of  green  and  orange  and 
crimson  torn,  stained,  often  flapping  in  the 
wind.  The  noise  of  their  marching  feet  was 
frequently  the  only  sound  that  broke  the  brief 
intervals  of  silence  between  cannon-shots. 


140       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

And  the  civilians  ?  Men  said  that  the  Dutch 
mayors  were  warning  away  fugitives  because 
Holland  could  house  no  more:  they  might  as 
well  have  warned  those  animals  which  I  once 
saw  flying  from  a  forest-fire.  The  few  remain- 
ing boats,  of  whatever  sort,  resembled  life- 
rafts  at  a  wreck,  the  pontoon-bridge  appeared 
to  be  awash  under  its  swarming  weight. 
Spilled  bundles  bobbed  in  the  water,  disgorg- 
ing their  heterogeneous  contents.  Not  far 
away,  I  saw  a  long  file  of  blue-clad  children 
merging  with  the  crowd:  the  wards  of  an 
orphanage  fired  by  the  bombardment.  All 
about,  the  smell  of  sweat  and  dirt  was  pressed 
back  upon  the  bodies  from  which  it  rose  by  the 
thickened  atmosphere,  and  over  the  shuffling 
and  squirming  multitude  of  burden-bearers,  the 
shells  roared  and  barked,  spitting  lead  and  iron. 

I  watched  them,  giving  what  small  help  I 
could,  until  the  military  took  possession  of  the 
bridge,  and  I  remained  in  the  open  until  four 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon.  We  had  now  suf- 
fered almost  as  acutely  as  those  who  were  hit. 
Imagine  the  scrape  of  a  fiddle-bow  across  an 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      141 

e-string,  kept  up  for  one  entire  day;  imagine  the 
screech  of  a  locomotive's  whistle  enduring,  not 
five  minutes,  but  for  a  night  and  a  day  without 
end.  The  mere  din  of  it  caused  physical  re- 
sults, and  the  gutters  in  the  neighborhood  of 
the  fugitives  soon  resembled  the  scuppers  of  a 
channel-steamer  in  a  cross-sea.  If  one  could 
only  have  replied,  struck  a  single  blow,  fired  a 
single  shot  in  response,  and  then  died;  that 
would  have  been  easy.  But  impotently  to  be 
shut  up  here  while  the  sky  rained  destruction: 
this  was  the  supreme  agony. 

When  I  got  back  to  the  house,  my  host  was 
full  of  news,  gathered,  apparently,  by  sitting 
there  and  seeing  no  one :  the  Germans  would  re- 
spect only  one  of  the  Hague-flags,  that  upon  the 
cathedral ;  they  were  directing  their  fire  so  as  to 
avoid  all  such  Antwerp  property  as  was  owned 
by  German  subjects;  the  roof  of  the  hotel  de 
ville  was  stove  in ;  the  arsenal  was  in  ashes ; 
so  was  the  military  hospital ;  the  prison  having 
been  shattered,  the  convicts  were  released; 
fifty  German  steamers  and  Rhinecraft,  held  at 
the  docks,  had  been  blown  up;  an  earth-shaking 


142       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

explosion  and  a  spreading  fan  of  light  on  the 
horizon  had  testified  to  the  Belgians'  annihila- 
tion of  one  of  their  own  forts;  the  government- 
stored  cargoes  from  those  German  ships  held 
by  the  war's  outbreak  at  Antwerp's  quays  were 
being  looted  by  the  remaining  populace ;  the  oil 
had  been  run  from  the  Hoboken  tanks  so  that 
the  enemy  could  not  ship  it  to  Germany,  where 
it  was  sadly  needed.  Of  some  of  these  rumors 
I  have  since  received  confirmation;  a  part  was 
probably  false;  much  of  it  was  contradictory; 
but  one  piece,  and  that  the  most  important,  ap- 
peared at  once  to  come  from  a  reliable  source : 
a  friend  of  my  host  was  a  member  of  the  Garde 
Civique;  this  man's  commanding-officer  had  in- 
timated that  the  Garde  was  about  to  be  ordered 
to  the  hotel  de  ville  to  give  up  their  arms. 

There  was  only  one  meaning  to  attach  to 
this:  the  authorities  were  preparing  to  sur- 
render. It  was  decided  that  I  should  leave  the 
city  immediately. 

Toward  ten  o'clock  at  night  there  came  a  lull 
in  the  shell-fire.  Not  guessing  that  this  was 
but  our  enemies'  pause  for  breath  before  their 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      143 

last  crushing  effort,  we  took  it  as  an  opportune 
moment — and,  as  the  event  seemed  to  prove,  all 
the  remaining  civilians  in  Antwerp,  save  those 
who  never  left  it,  shared  our  point  of  view. 

We  opened  the  door:  it  was  a  night  without 
a  stir  of  wind  ("Thank  God,  there  is  no  wind !" 
my  host  muttered,  as  we  passed  into  the  street) ; 
but  we  had  gone  only  the  briefest  distance  be- 
fore the  investing  artillery,  as  if  realizing  that 
the  end  was  near,  redoubled  its  superhuman 
efforts.  Within  a  few  minutes  there  was  cer- 
tain evidence  that  the  cannonade  was  now  gen- 
eral; the  entire  city,  save  for  the  possible  ex- 
emption of  such  buildings  as  the  cathedral, 
seemed  blistering  and  bursting  under  one  great 
down-pour  of  fire  and  iron.  All  Antwerp 
seemed  ablaze;  the  air  in  the  street  was  like 
that  in  a  ship's  engine-room. 

We  started  on  a  trot  for  the  river-road. 
Street-lamp  there  was  none,  and  the  atmos- 
phere was  alight  only  with  a  livid  incandescence 
that  illuminated  the  destruction,  but  betrayed 
one's  feet.  Shells  seemed  to  break  over  our 
very  heads,  tiles  dropped  by  our  ears,  now  and 


144       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

then  the  street  heaved  and  splintered  ahead  of 
us.  I  said  to  myself  that  nothing  could  be  more 
terrible — and  just  then  the  more  terrible  hap- 
pened. 

A  rare  light — 'perhaps  it  was  a  searchlight — 
was  playing  on  a  portion  of  the  street  far  ahead 
of  me.  Suddenly  something  bolted  past  above 
my  head  toward  that  light — something  hot, 
scorching,  and  of  tremendous  size,  something 
that  roared  like  a  frightened  train  and  sped  like 
a  meteoric  sun.  The  very  draft  of  it  seemed 
first  to  suck  me  upwards  and  then  hurl  me  far 
forward  and  sidewise  on  my  face.  I  fell,  as  a 
man  might  fall  before  a  cyclonic  blast  from  the 
furnace  where  worlds  are  made ;  but,  as  I  fell,  I 
saw,  or  thought  I  saw,  that  meteoric  sun  ex- 
plode up  there  where  the  searchlight  played. 
If  I  thought  of  anything,  it  was  of  an  earth- 
quake. I  know  that  there  shot  out  a  sheet  of 
flame  that  must  have  been  two  or  three  hundred 
feet  wide  and  fully  as  high.  I  know  that  a 
Niagara  of  stones  and  clay  leaped  upward 
from  the  distant  spot.  I  know  that  a  hail  of 
pulverized  stone  poured  all  about  me,  and  that 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      145 

the  detonation  rocked  the  city  of  Antwerp  as  a 
giant  might  rock  a  cradle  that  he  stumbled  over. 
I  know  that  now;  but  then  all  that  I  knew 
clearly  was  that  all  our  previous  alarms  had 
been  trifles  and  that  this  at  last  was  the  begin- 
ning of  the  forty-two  centimeter  guns. 

We  staggered  at  last  to  our  feet;  we  blund- 
ered here  and  there  and  into  another  wide 
thoroughfare  and  were  immediately  engulfed 
by  a  tremendous  mob  whose  desperate  destina- 
tion was  our  own.  Instantly  we  became  drops 
of  that  shouting,  scrambling,  struggling  tidal- 
wave  of  sheer  humanity  in  the  bulk  of  which — 
householders  flinging  away  their  rescued  treas- 
ures, husbands  forgetting  wives  and  mothers 
becoming  separated  from  children — there  sur- 
vived only  the  brute-instinct  of  self-preserva- 
tion. The  air  crackled  like  marble  under  ham- 
mer-blows ;  the  ears  ached,  the  head  throbbed, 
the  brain  reeled.  Civilization,  progress,  cul- 
ture: this  seemed  the  end  of  them;  it  was  as  if 
they  had  never  existed,  or,  having  existed,  had 
been  as  smiling  masks  t<>  cover  f<»r  a  day  the 
snarling  face  of  the  tiger  that  is  Man. 


146       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Lesser  shells  were  nothing  now.  They  fell 
hot  in  our  midst  and  mowed  people  down :  the 
crowd  seemed  to  trample  their  screaming 
mouths  into  silence.  Again  and  again  the 
blasts  enveloped  us.  Of  one  the  shock  hurled 
my  friend  and  me,  still,  fortuitously  together, 
into  a  darkened  gateway.  A  half-dozen  sol- 
diers lay  there,  sleeping  the  sleep  of  exhaustion 
amid  all  this  pandemonium  and  carnage;  their 
faces  were  drawn  by  weariness,  white  with 
fatigue  where  they  were  not  black  with  powder ; 
already  they  looked  dead.  A  shell  exploded 
over  the  house  next  door,  tearing  off  its  cornice. 

"They're  getting  close  again,"  said  my 
friend.     "We  must  move  on." 

We  replunged  into  the  mob.  We  had  not 
gone  a  hundred  yards  when,  behind  us,  there 
was  a  frightful  crash.  I  looked  back:  the 
house  before  which  we  had  been  pausing 
pitched,  over  those  sleeping  soldiers,  bodily 
into  the  street. 

A  stampede  of  shouting  carbineers  swept  out 
of  a  side-street,  bowling  over  all  who  stood  in 
their  way.     Our  wave  swerved  to  the  left  and 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      147 

into  a  dark  thoroughfare.  From  the  crowd  an 
old  woman  seized  my  arm ;  she  spoke  with  mul- 
tiplicity of  fumbling  gestures,  her  very  fingers 
trembling,  but  she  spoke  Flemish  and,  even  if 
I  could  have  understood  the  language,  I  should 
not  have  been  able  to  hear  more  than  a  separate 
word  or  two.  She  put  my  hand  to  her  breast, 
and  I  felt  that  her  dress  was  wet  and  sticky 
with  blood. 

Once  more  the  light  increased  and  the  noise. 
Again  and  again  explosions  flung  us  to  the 
street.  Weighted  with  a  destruction  before 
which  the  powers  of  cordite  seem  puerile,  a  shell 
from  a  forty-two  centimeter  gun  would  strike 
a  building  and  the  entire  structure  would  vanish 
in  a  puff  of  smoke — absolutely  vanish,  so  that 
when  the  smoke  cleared,  there  was  nothing 
where  it  had  stood  save  a  great  hole  in  the 
ground.  Now,  so  highly  increased  was  the  ac- 
tivity of  even  the  lesser  cannon  that  when  they 
alone  were  in  action,  one  had  to  shout  to  be 
heard  at  all  by  his  neighbor. 

Most  of  what  happened  T  do  not  remember. 
Once  T  tried  to  think  of  my  home,  of  the  quiet 


148       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

order  of  my  daily  life,  of  the  busy  routine  of 
peaceful  cities:  it  was  inconceivable;  it  was 
something  that  I  must  have  dreamed  a  thou- 
sand years  ago.  I  lost  my  friend ;  I  saw  a  shell 
coming  and  plunged  against  a  closed  door.  It 
gave  way,  and  I  staggered  into  a  room  where  a 
woman  sat  calmly  knitting.  She  looked  at  me 
without  surprise,  even  without  curiosity,  not 
speaking.  When  the  explosion  was  over,  I 
went  out.  The  last  that  I  saw  of  her,  she  was 
still  knitting,  as  unmoved  as  a  god. 

Back  in  the  crowd,  people  were  now  dropping 
out  on  every  side,  not  heeded.  There  was  the 
strong  odor  of  slaughter.  Here  a  man  flung 
up  his  hand,  yelled  and  pitched  forward  on  his 
face ;  there  another  lay  by  the  curb  with  blood 
flowing  from  his  mouth.  I  remember  picking 
up  a  child  whose  leg  was  shattered  and  giving  it 
into  the  care  of  some  persons  in  a  nearby  house 
— and  yet  I  wonder  if  I  really  did  this.  As  we 
neared  the  exit  from  this  city  of  horrors,  the 
struggle  grew,  and  the  bitterness  of  fights  for 
places  in  advance  was  added  to  that  of  death 
from  bursting  shrapnel. 


THE  RED  RAIN  IN  ANTWERP      149 

All  the  abominations  of  battle  reached  their 
climax.  I  think  that  if  anybody  had  been  so 
silly  as  to  tell  those  men  that  the  race  had  pro- 
gressed since  it  was  apes,  they  would  have  died 
of  laughter  at  his  preposterous  supposition. 
Women  became  sick  from  the  throat-biting 
stench  of  the  exploding  shells;  some  of  them 
lay  in  the  doorways,  wrapping  their  skirts  about 
their  heads  to  lessen  by  some  smallest  frac- 
tion that  insufferable  uproar.  One  man,  ap- 
parently quite  resolute  of  heart,  lost  all  control 
of  his  legs;  we  read  of  people's  knees  knocking 
together  in  fright :  this  man  seemed  less  afraid 
than  most,  but  his  muscles  ceased  to  function, 
and  his  knees  so  beat  together  that  he  collapsed. 
In  front  of  me,  another  man's  head  leapt  from 
his  shoulders;  for  an  instant  his  trunk  stood 
erect,  from  the  stump  that  was  his  throat  a  red 
fountain  spurting  upward,  then  the  decapitated 
body  crumpled  grotesquely  to  the  street.  I 
bent  stupidly  toward  it,  but  a  woman  behind  me 
urged  me  on;  slipping,  nevertheless,  she  sought 
with  a  careless  kick,  to  shove  the  corpse  out  of 
her  way;  its  hand  seemed  to  wave  at  her  de- 


150       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

risively.     An    instant    later,    as    a    shell    de- 
scended, she  sank  on  her  knees  to  pray.  .  .  . 

That  was  the  end  of  it :  we  gained  the  River- 
road.  We  had  begun  to  believe  those  shells  to 
be  malevolent  deities  bent  on  the  cutting  to 
pieces  of  a  world,  to  be  at  least  possessed  of  a 
consciousness  of  their  own,  a  diabolic  con- 
sciousness ;  they  were  angered  by  the  old  town's 
refusal  to  surrender,  enraged  by  its  resistance; 
they  were  avenging  the  failures  of  their  prede- 
cessors: they  were  devils  gone  mad  with  the 
smell  of  blood  and  the  din  of  destruction.  In 
half  an  hour  more,  all  that  was  behind  us.  I 
looked  back  at  the  roofs  and  towers  silhouetted 
against  a  red  glare,  covered  by  a  huge  pall  of 
smoke.  On  every  side  flames  seemed  to  leap 
heaven-high.  Antwerp  lay  there  burning  like 
Valhalla.  _. 


VI 

AT  THE  GRAVE  OF  A  GREAT  TRADITION 

I  had  lived  in  England  for  four  years;  but, 
from  its  outbreak,  I  never  quite  understood 
what  this  war  meant  to  her  until  a  certain  dark, 
autumnal  day,  months  after  the  war  began.  I 
had  done  a  little — a  very  little — toward  help- 
ing England's  work  for  the  Belgian  refugees 
that  sought  her  shores;  but  I  never  until  then 
understood  the  spirit  back  of  that  work. 

London  on  that  day  was  wrapped  in  a  pall 
of  yellow  fog.  It  lay  heavily  on  the  broad 
streets;  it  swathed  the  tops  of  buildings  as  if  it 
were  some  strange  veil  of  mourning  about  a 
myriad  of  widowed  heads;  its  fringes  crossed 
a  leaden  sky  through  which  no  faintest  hint  of 
blue  could  pierce. 

London  shivered  with  the  dispiriting  cold. 
Raw  and  penetrating,  the  November  chill 
gleamed    wetly    on    the    pavements.     It   crept 

151 


152       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

through  the  damp  walls  of  shops  and  factories, 
shot  between  the  crevices  of  rat-eaten  tene- 
ments, gnawed  its  way  into  the  vitals  of  palaces. 

London  was  silent.  The  greatest  city  in  the 
world,  the  roar  of  whose  traffic  is  one  of  the 
pat  phrases  of  travel-talk,  now  scarcely  whis- 
pered; it  breathed  low.  The  mighty  Strand, 
daily  choked  by  howling  vehicles,  presented  to 
view  an  empty  roadway  lined  by  motionless  in- 
fantrymen shrunk  into  brown  overcoats  and 
resting  upon  bayoneted  rifles.  The  pavements 
from  Charing  Cross  to  Ludgate  Hill  were 
jammed  with  a  throng  that  stood  still.  Black 
thousands  made  a  solid  mass  of  humanity  along 
Northumberland  Avenue  and  Victoria  Em- 
bankment, from  Trafalgar  Square  to  St.  Paul's, 
and  yet  scarcely  a  sound  was  heard. 

And  this  was  at  ten  o'clock  of  a  week-day 
morning  in  the  heart  of  the  capital  of  one  of 
the  greatest  civilizations  that  our  earth  has 
borne.  It  was  a  moment  that  future  historians 
will  celebrate  in  pompous  periods  as  perhaps 
the  foremost  crisis  of  the  world-war.  It  was 
the  moment  when  a  mighty  nation  at  the  high- 


AT  THE  GRAVE  153 

tide  of  its  struggle  for  sheer  existence  paused 
to  do  honor  to  its  past.  England,  the  Island 
Kingdom,  and  Britain,  the  globe-empire,  were 
paying  their  last  tribute  to  one  of  their  hero- 
dead. 

For  two  hours  that  human  sea  had  remained 
at  somber  rest.  For  two  hours  in  the  yellow 
fog,  the  biting  cold,  the  dour  quiet.  It  was 
waiting  the  funeral-procession  of  the  spare 
figure  loved  by  every  Briton  under  the  name  of 
"Bobs,"  of  that  general  who  had  warned  it  of 
this  European  struggle  and  whom,  loving,  it 
had  failed  to  heed:  it  was  waiting  the  funeral- 
procession  of  Field-Marshal  Lord  Roberts  of 
India  and  Africa,  of  Madras  and  Kandahar. 

Half-past  ten — and  a  great  gun  boomed 
solemnly,  muffled  by  the  fog,  from  the  direction 
of  St.  James's  Park.  A  few  faint  strains  of 
music  followed,  painfully  creeping  through  the 

Iden  air.  That  shot  was  the  first  of  nineteen 
minute-guns  fired  by  the  Hampshire  Artillery; 
that  music  was  Chopin's  "Marche  Funebre" 
played  by  the  military-band  in  the  closed  court- 
yard of  Charing  Cross  Railway  station.     The 


154        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

special  train  had  arrived  from  Ascot,  where 
the  private  services  had  been  held,  and  the  coffin 
had  been  carried  to  a  gun-carriage,  escorted 
by  a  detail  of  the  Royal  Horse  Artillery,  while 
a  guard  of  honor  came  to  salute,  and  the  chiefs 
of  the  Empire's  army  and  navy  stood  by  bare- 
headed in  the  now  steadily  falling  rain. 

The  crowd  stirred.  Along  the  ganglia  of  its 
mighty  organism  there  passed,  from  the  barred 
station-gates  to  the  barrier  stretching  across 
the  street  before  St.  Paul's,  a  long-drawn  sigh. 
The  line  of  great-coated  soldiers  shivered. 
Here  and  there  one  of  the  many  new  special 
constables,  in  their  novel  uniform  of  dark  over- 
coat and  peaked  caps,  hurried  across  the 
Strand.  Again  the  gun  boomed,  and  again. 
The  music  came  nearer.  There  was  the  sound 
of  thousands  catching  breath,  leaning  forward, 
searching  that  billowing  curtain  of  sulphurous 
fog  which  barred  the  thoroughfare. 

One  expected  the  usual  heralds.  One  waited 
for  the  blare  of  trumpets,  the  brisk  clatter  of 
hoofs,  the  cheers  that  greet  every  parade. 

There  was  none  of  these.     The  music  had 


AT  THE  GRAVE  155 

ceased;  the  steps  of  the  marchers  dragged;  the 
multitudes  watched  with  lips  compressed  as  the 
fog-curtains  parted  and  the  procession  came 
through. 

"Slow  march"  was  the  order,  and  slowly 
marching    they    advanced.     First    a    line    of 
pipers,  the  London  Scottish,  their  weird  instru- 
ments swinging  dumbly  at  the  breast.     After 
them,  to  the  sole  accompaniment  of  scraping 
boots,  column  upon  column  of  soldiers — the 
Fourteenth  County  of  London  Battalion  of  the 
London  Scottish,  the  Fifth   Battalion  of  the 
Royal   Sussex,   the  Fourth  of  the  Grenadier 
Guards — not  in  the  bright  plaid  and  scarlet 
with  which  the  old  London  was  familiar,  but 
all   in   somber   greatcoats,   their   muskets   re- 
versed, passing  between  the  twin  rows  of  guar- 
dians at  the  curbs  who  rested  on  their  arms. 
More  and  more  they  came,  these  mourning 
military,  out  of  the  fog  from  the  Embankment, 
along  a  briefly  visible  strip  of  mid-day  twilight, 
and  then  down  New  Bridge-street  and  into  the 
fog  once  more. 

It  was  this  silence  that  was  hardest  to  bear. 


156       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

It  was  intense,  abnormal.  The  multitude 
gasped  as  if  in  loud  relief  when,  having  passed 
into  the  yellow  clouds  that  enveloped  the  thor- 
oughfares about  St.  Paul's,  the  band  of  the 
Scots  Guards  resumed  the  music  of  the  Chopin 
march. 

Came  the  Second  Battalion  of  the  Irish 
Guards,  fresh  from  the  battlefields  of  northern 
France;  a  khaki-coated  detachment  of  the 
Royal  Naval  Brigade,  a  company  of  cadets  and, 
in  uniforms  of  light  blue  and  gray,  some  boys 
from  the  Officers-Training  Corps  at  Eton. 
Then,  through  the  curtain,  stepped  a  group  of 
little  mules,  each  with  a  queer  pack  upon  its 
back  and  each  led  by  a  man  in  a  dull  red  turban. 

"The  Indian  mountain-batteries,"  whispered 
somebody — what  talk  there  was  came  always  in 
a  whisper:  "See  the  guns  they  carry  strapped 
to  them?" 

A  battery  of  the  Royal  Horse  Artillery  fol- 
lowed, and  after  it  a  single  gun-carriage. 

That  gun-carriage  bore  something  draped 
with  the  Union  Jack.  On  the  flag  was  a  red 
velvet  case  on  which  rested  glittering  insignia. 


— 


AT  THE  GRAVE  157 

Behind,  a  black-liveried  groom  led  a  nervously- 
stepping  horse. 

There  was  a  soft  new  sound  along  the  street : 
the  watching  thousands  were  removing  their 
hats.  Here  was  the  gun-carriage  to  save 
which  Lord  Roberts's  only  son  had  given  his 
life  in  South  Africa.  This  was  the  dead  mar- 
shal's charger;  those  were  his  baton,  service- 
cap  and  medals;  that  Hag  which  he  had  fought 
for  covered  the  body  of  "Bobs." 

The  crowd  stood  uncovered  in  the  now  pelt- 
ing rain.  They  seemed  scarcely  to  see  the 
group  of  distinguished  officers  that  came  be- 
hind the  coffin.  Followed — in  dull  khaki  and 
not  in  their  shining  breastplate  and  gay  scarlet 
and  blue — the  Royal  Horse  Guards  and  the 
First  Life  Guards,  King  Edward's  Horse  in 
full  complement  bringing  up  the  rear.  The 
multitude  of  London  was  standing  almost  re- 
gardless  of  them  while  they  filed  past  in  a 
seemingly  endless  line,  long  after  the  head  of 
the  procession  had  entered  St.  Paul's. 

That  historic  cathedral,  the  last  home  of  so 
many  of  England's  famous  soldier  and  sailor 


158       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

dead,  though  open  now  only  to  ticket-holders, 
was  well  nigh  filled  an  hour  before  the  funeral- 
service  began.  Its  coronals  of  lights  fell  dimly 
over  tattered  battle-flags  that  had  waved  in 
fields  where  the  kingdom  won  her  glory  and  the 
Empire  her  empiry.  Only  a  faint  twilight  pre- 
vailed. The  stained-glass  of  the  windows  was 
a  series  of  dark  patches,  brown  like  dried  blood. 
The  always  great  distances  assumed  the  air  of 
immensity.  The  splendid  dome  held  a  cloud  of 
mist,  and  far  away  into  the  cloistered  shadows 
faded  a  huge  congregation  in  civilian  black  or 
service  uniform  with  here  and  there  a  lonely 
coat  of  red. 

Half-past  eleven:  a  door  swung  open  and 
a  number  of  men  in  red  robes,  the  Lord  Mayor 
and  Sheriffs  of  London,  passed  to  their  seats 
in  the  choir.  Eleven- f orty :  in  flowing  vest- 
ments black  and  white,  the  Bishop  of  London 
and  his  fellow-priests  passed  down  the  main 
aisle  to  the  great  entrance  to  meet  the  dead  man 
there. 

The  next  moments  were  moments  of  tense 
waiting.     Played  by  the  band  of  the  Royal 


AT  THE  GRAVE  159 

Artillery,  Schubert's  ''Adieu,"  which  Lord 
Roberts  loved,  tore  at  the  heartstrings  of  the 
attending-  throng.  Violins  sang  with  the  pierc- 
ing sweetness  of  nightingales;  the  pure  notes 
of  a  harp  took  up  the  refrain  and  died  away  in 
echoes,  trailing  through  the  distant  dome. 
The  music  of  the  Funeral  March  sobbed  forth. 
There  came  the  marrow-chilling  roll  of  artil- 
lery-like kettledrums,  broken  by  the  shattering 
rifle-crash  of  snare-drums,  and  then  the  ar- 
rived procession  was  proceeding  toward  the  al- 
tar in  the  east. 

"I  am  the  Resurrection  and  the  Life  .  .  ." 
The  cathedral  clergy  led  the  way,  their  choir 

following.  The  coffin  came  next,  borne  high 
on  the  shoulders  of  eight  sergeants  who  had 
served  in  the  armies  under  "Bobs'  "  comniar  : 
Immediately  after  it  walked  Lord  Kitchener, 
his  expression  set,  his  brow  furrowed,  his  fea- 
tures a  little  harder  and  a  little  older  than  they 
appear  in  pictures  of  him  which  are  so  popular 
in  America.  Tic  was  one  of  several  honorary 
pallbearers,  among  whom  Admiral  Lord 
Charles    Beresford    was    conspicuous    for   his 


160        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

handsome,  bigoted  face.  The  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury  came  next,  and  after  him,  having 
entered  the  cathedral  almost  unnoticed,  the 
King  of  England  and  Emperor  of  India. 

He  wore  a  service-cap  and  army-boots  on 
which  spurs  glimmered.  His  overcoat  was 
that  of  an  officer  on  active  duty,  and  about  its 
left  sleeve  passed  a  crepe  band.  His  bearded 
face  was  grave.  Word  was  passed  that  Queen 
Alexandra  and  the  Princess  Victoria  had  come 
privately  to  the  cathedral,  but  few  saw  them. 
For  the  moment  all  eyes  were  on  the  King,  who 
stepped  to  his  seat  in  an  ancient,  high-backed, 
oaken  chair  by  the  steps  to  the  south  transept, 
close  to  the  cleared  central  square  beneath  the 
dome  where,  high  above  the  heads  of  the  con- 
gregation and  surrounded  by  flickering  can- 
delabra, the  coffin  now  rested,  just  over  the 
grave  of  Nelson,  on  the  catafalque  used  at  the 
funeral  of  Wellington,  sixty  years  ago. 

The  members  of  the  funeral-party  took  their 
several  stations  round  about — Admiral  Sir  E. 
H.  Seymour,  Field-Marshal  Sir  Evelyn  Wood, 
representatives  of  foreign  royalty,  leaders  of 


AT  THE  GRAVE  161 

the  Government  and  the  Opposition,  French 
soldiers  and  bearded  Russians,  a  Serbian  min- 
ister aglow  with  medals,  Indian  officers,  depu- 
tations from  the  War  Office  and  Admiralty, 
the  diplomatic  corps — they  were  grouped  about 
the  catafalque.  Motionless  they  sat  beneath 
the  coffin. 

It  was  such  a  little  coffin.  There  seemed 
something  incongruous  in  its  littleness  amid 
this  panoply  of  which  it  was  the  center.  A 
little  wooden  box  wherein  was  held  what  re- 
mained of  a  long  service  and  what  remained  of 
an  ancient  order  of  things  far  older,  an  ancient 
order  that  included  so  many  services,  so  many 
conquests  and  defeats,  so  many  acquisitions  of 
empire,  fights  by  sea  and  land,  night  marches 
and  pitched  battles,  so  many  countless  thou- 
sands of  sacrificed  lives  since  English  history 
began. 

The  funeral-service  was,  of  course,  that  of 
the  Church  of  England,  but  much  abbreviated 
here,  because  parts  of  it  had  been  previously 
celebrated  in  France  and  at  Lord  Roberts' 
Ascot  home:  the  war,  beside-,  left  public  men 


1 62       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

small  leisure  even  for  the  burial  of  their  dead. 
The  prescribed  opening  sentences  were  chanted 
to  the  music  composed  by  Dr.  Croft;  the  mag- 
nificent cathedral  choir,  perhaps  the  world's 
best,  chanted  Barnby's  setting  of  the  Twenty- 
third  Psalm;  Dean  Inge  of  St.  Paul's  read  the 
Lesson  (I  Cor.  xv,  50)  and,  at  the  request  of 
Lord  Roberts'  family,  there  followed,  over  the 
body  of  this  man  of  battles,  the  hymn  begin- 
ning: 

Peace,  perfect  peace. 

Then  the  Bishop  of  London,  himself  a  chap- 
lain at  the  front,  read  the  prayers.  There  was 
a  movement  among  the  mourners.  The  King 
rose  and  came  forward  from  one  side,  Lord 
Kitchener  from  the  other,  and,  to  the  light  of 
the  flickering  candles,  while  the  Dean  pro- 
nounced the  committal-sentences,  the  coffin,  re- 
moved from  the  Wellington  catafalque,  was 
lowered  for  a  few  feet  of  its  descent  into  a 
grave  that  yawned  near  the  chancel. 

The  eyes  of  the  monarch  and  his  general  met 
across  that  grave.  The  choir  found  voice — 
"For  all  Thy  saints  who  from  their  labors  rest" 


AT  THE  GRAVE  163 

— and,  while  the  world-war  hung  in  the  balance 
a  few  hundred  miles  away  amid  the  storm- 
whipped  trenches  of  northern  France,  here,  in 
the  Empire's  capital,  amid  her  soldier  dead, 
there  rose  to  the  old  dome  those  familiar 
words : 

And  when  the  strife  is  fierce,  the  warfare  long, 
Steals  on  the  ear  that  distant  triumph-song, 
And  hearts  are  brave  again,  and  arms  are  strong — 

Alleluia ! 

The  Archbishop  of  Canterbury  pronounced 
the  benediction.  Wearing  his  gorgeous  tabard 
of  red  and  gold,  the  Garter  King-at-Arms  came 
to  the  choir-steps  and,  facing  the  great  nave, 
followed  an  ancient  custom:  "proclaimed  the 
styles  and  titles"  of  the  dead.  The  congrega- 
tion stood.  Again  Chopin's  "Marche  Funebre" 
wailed  through  the  cathedral,  and,  as  it  ceased, 
from  somewhere  in  that  mighty  pile  there  came 
a  great  blast  of  trumpets :  the  trumpeters  of 
the  Royal  Artillery  rang  out  the  "Last  Post." 

They  went  away,  all  the  dignitaries,  all  the 
mourners:  royalty,  military,  statesmen,  diplo- 
mats.    For   hours   out    in   the   sleet,   a   huge 


1 64       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

crowd  of  people  that  these  mourners  governed 
had  been  waiting,  and  now,  from  two  o'clock 
until  five,  that  crowd  filed  beside  the  lowered 
coffin — thousands  of  men,  women  and  children. 
They  too  looked  at  the  little  box  under  its 
Union  Jack  and  guarded  by  its  sentries — 
looked,  and  went  their  way.  Save  for  the  at- 
tendants, the  cathedral  was  empty,  the  famous 
dead  deserted.  Darkness  fell  on  nave  and 
chancel,  and  in  that  darkness  the  burial  of  Lord 
Roberts  was  completed,  and  "Bobs"  was  laid  to 
rest  with  Nelson  and  with  Wellington. 

Did  that  burial  mark  an  epoch?  When  this 
war  began,  we  were  told  that  it  was  a  war  to 
end  war;  but  already  there  are  other  signs  in 
the  heavens.  Meanwhile,  two  things  are  cer- 
tain: First  of  them,  the  charity  that  comes 
with  every  sense  of  loss  has  bred  in  England 
new  strength  of  purpose  to  right,  whatever  else 
she  does,  the  wrongs  of  Belgium  who  bled  for 
her.  And  next,  and  perhaps  philosophically  as 
important,  the  old  sort  of  war  is  over;  in  its 
place  has  appeared  a  new  trade  whereat  old 
fingers  are  useless;  modern  methods  have  in- 


AT  THE  GRAVE  165 

creased  the  horrors  of  battle  and  robbed  the 
dying  soldier  of  his  glory — Frederick  Sleigh, 
Lord  Roberts,  represented  a  past  order;  when 
he  was  buried  in  St.  Paul's,  a  mighty  tradition 
was  buried  with  him. 


VII 

THE   IRON   RAIN   AT   SCARBOROUGH 

Even  after  the  death  of  Lord  Roberts,  Eng- 
land had  still  something  to  learn  of  what  the 
war  meant  to  Belgium.  The  island's  resolu- 
tion to  right  the  wrongs  of  her  little  sister- 
state  was  taken,  was  even  established :  the  will- 
ingness of  the  people  was  stirred,  was  even 
splendidly  at  work.  The  British  Empire,  fight- 
ing for  its  life,  and  the  British  populace,  scan- 
ning casualty-lists  that  day  by  day  grew 
until  there  remained  scarce  one  English  family 
without  some  member  dead,  wounded,  prisoner 
or  missing — both  had  made  space  among  their 
sufferings  for  a  working-out  of  their  debt  and 
duty  to  that  Kingdom  and  its  people  across  the 
shallow  North  Sea.  But  the  immediate  ap- 
preciation of  what  Belgium  and  the  Belgians 
endured  was  still  to  be  brought  home  to  Eng- 
land and  Englishmen. 

166 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     167 

When  it  did  come,  the  example  was  far  short 
of  all  that  it  exemplified.  To  those  of  us  who 
saw  it  with  eyes  that  had  seen  Antwerp,  it 
was  little.  To  those  who,  watching  its  brief 
panic  and  noting  its  speedily  repaired  destruc- 
tion, could  remember  the  legions  of  the  starv- 
ing and  the  leagues  of  desolation  throughout 
the  Belgian  countryside,  this  attack  seemed  a 
trifle.  But  for  the  mass  of  the  people  of  Eng- 
land, and  for  the  Government  upon  which  their 
public  opinion  reacted,  it  served.  Germany 
has  done  an  unspeakable  wrong  to  Belgium; 
she  did  Belgium  a  mighty  service — she  even 
did  a  mighty  service  toward  the  strengthening 
of  the  English  arms — when,  in  the  morning  of 
December  16,  19 14,  she  bombarded  Scarbor- 
ough, Whitby  and  the  Ilartlepools. 

It  is  of  the  raid  on  Scarborough  and  Whitby 
that  I  chance  to  have  a  personal  knowledge,  be- 
causc  my  house  in  England  stands  close  to  the 
clifT-edge  along  the  shore,  about  four-and-a- 
half  miles  in  a  direct  line  from  the  former  town 
and  ten  miles  from  the  latter.  Whitby  I  went 
to   within   a  day  of  its   visitation;  a   part  of 


1 68       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

the  bombardment  of  Scarborough  I  watched 
through  binoculars  from  my  workroom  win- 
dows as  you,  opera-glass  in  hand,  may  watch  a 
mimic  battle  on  the  stage  from  a  comfortable 
seat  in  the  New  York  Hippodrome. 

The  Germans'  own  comments  upon  their  raid 
are  worth  at  least  a  partial  quoting.  The  Ber- 
lin wireless-station  sent  out  the  following  re- 
port: 

Dec.  17,  6:20  a.  m. 
-  It  is  officially  reported  this  morning  that  our  high 
sea  forces  approached  the  East  coast  of  England  early 
on  Wednesday  morning  and  bombarded  the  fortified 
towns  of  Scarborough  and  Hartlepool. 

According  to  English  reports  received  here,  more 
than  20  persons  were  killed  and  80  wounded.  In 
Hartlepool  considerable  damage  has  been  done,  one  of 
the  gas-reservoirs  being  on  fire. 

The  bombardment  of  the  fortress  at  West  Hartle- 
pool commenced  between  8  and  9  a.  m. 

Two  churches  were  damaged  in  Scarborough,  and 
several  roofs  fell  in.  The  weather  was  misty  at  the 
time  of  the  bombardment. 

From  Hull  it  is  reported  that  the  authorities  at 
Scarborough  received  information  at  an  early  hour  of 
a  proposed  attack  on  the  coast. 

It  is  reported  that  two  German  cruisers  fiercely  bom- 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     169 

barded  Whitby  and  destroyed  the  signal  station  build- 
ing. 

As  for  the  German  newspaper-press,  its 
statements  had  about  the  same  measure  of 
exactitude.  Two  samples  will  serve:  "Once 
more,"  said  the  Berliner  Tagcblatt,  "our  naval 
forces  have  shelled  English  fortified  places." — 
"This  time,"  declared  the  Berliner  Neuesten 
Nachrichten,  "it  is  not  merely  a  daring  cruiser- 
raid,  or  the  mere  throwing  of  a  bomb,  but  a 
regular  bombardment  of  fortified  places;  it  is 
further  proof  of  the  gallantry  of  our  navy." 

I  am  told  in  America  that  the  Prussian  press- 
bureau,  in  its  reports  intended  for  American 
consumption,  has  persisted  in  this  attitude: 
continues  to  assert  that  Scarborough,  Whitby 
and  the  Hartlepools  were  "fortified  towns." 
About  Hartlepool  I  know  nothing;  but  I  do 
know  that,  last  December,  Scarborough  and 
Whitby  were  no  more  fortified  than  are  Asbury 
Tark  and  Cape  May. 

Scarborough  is  a  closely-built  town  that 
climbs  from  the  water-front  of  two  small  bays, 


170       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

shut  in  by  cliffs,  up  a  steep  hill'  for  about  a  mile 
and  a  half  inland — so  closely  built,  indeed,  that, 
in  the  old  part  of  the  town  nearest  the  sea,  the 
tall,  thin  houses  lean  over  one  another  along 
dark  and  narrow  passageways  and  winding 
streets  that  are  often  merely  flights  of  desper- 
ate stairs.  Scarborough  has  no  factories;  it 
is  one  of  the  few  towns  of  its  size  in  Yorkshire 
upon  which  the  blight  of  English  industrialism 
has  not  descended.  Since  Sheridan  laid  in  it 
the  scene  of  one  of  his  undeservedly  forgotten 
comedies,  it  has  remained  a  popular  bathing- 
resort  in  summer,  because  of  its  splendid  beach, 
and,  until  the  morning  of  the  attack,  had  been 
through  some  years  becoming  an  almost  equally 
popular  health-resort,  because  of  its  bracing 
air,  for  invalids  in  wintertime.  This  popular- 
ity has  made  it  rich  without  the  aid  of  blacken- 
ing chimneys  or  roaring  looms.  From  June 
until  September,  its  shifting  population  mounts 
high  into  the  hundred-thousands;  from  Sep- 
tember until  January  its  annual  visitors  are 
many  and  loyal ;  throughout  the  year,  its  house- 
holders, increased  by  a  large  number  of  wealthy 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     171 

men  retired  here  with  their  families  from  active 
business,  remain  at  about  forty-five  thousand. 
Much  of  it  is  beautiful.  There  are  pleasure- 
grounds  about  the  lake  a  quarter-mile  from  the 
sea-front  to  the  north,  and  handsome  gardens 
along  the  cliff-tops  to  the  south  of  it.  The 
center  of  the  town  is  cut  by  a  deep  valley  con- 
verted into  a  pretty  park  where  the  trees  run 
almost  to  the  ocean,  and  there  are  driveways  up 
Oliver's  Mount,  the  hill  five  hundred  feet  high, 
at  the  back.  The  new  town  is  as  modern  as 
this  morning's  newspaper,  with  such  depart- 
ment-stores as  the  Rowntrees',  which  it  would 
be  difficult  to  equal  in  any  town  of  twice  this 
size  in  America;  with  theaters  in  which  even 
the  best  of  English  players  do  not  scorn  to  ap- 
pear, and  with  a  score  of  boarding-schools  that 
are  famous  throughout  the  country.  The  old 
town,  descending  to  the  beach  with  all  the  cau- 
tion of  a  new  mountaineer  descending  an  Al- 
pine slope,  is,  on  the  other  hand,  delightfully 
mediaeval  and  boasts,  intact,  a  house  that  Rich- 
ard ITT.  once,  for  a  short  time,  made  his  home. 
The  Foreshore,  of  course,  is  the  typical  fore- 


172       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

shore  of  an  English  seaside-resort,  lined  with 
shops  and  large  hotels.  Finally,  dividing  the 
two  bays,  cutting  the  town  into  "Northside" 
and  "Southside,"  and  surrounded  by  a  drive 
and  breakwater  which  were  constructed  at 
enormous  cost,  and  against  which  the  broken 
waves  are  said  to  leap  higher  than  they  do  al- 
most anywhere  else  in  the  world,  rises  the 
Gibraltar-like  Castle-Hill  that  bears  upon  its 
top  the*  remnants  of  that  castle  from  which 
Piers  Gaveston  went  out  to  die;  against  which 
Cavalier  and  Roundhead  forces  were  in  turn 
precipitated;  in  which  Fox,  the  Quaker,  was 
held  prisoner,  and  near  which  the  gentlest  of 
the  Bronte  sisters  lies  buried:  a  low  wall,  a 
grass-grown  and  deserted  court  and  three  sides 
of  the  Norman  keep,  a  blackened  ruin  since  that 
day  when  Bonny  Prince  Charley  marched  on 
Prestonpans. 

Scarborough  was  not  fortified.  I  know  this 
of  my  own  personal  knowledge ;  I  know  it  from 
personal  investigation  both  immediately  before 
and  immediately  after  the  bombardment.  On 
the  Foreshore,  at  the  foot  of  the  Valley,  there 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     173 

had  been  piled  a  few  bags  filled  with  sand 
behind  perhaps  fifty  yards  of  barbed-wire  en- 
tanglements and  in  front  of  a  couple  of 
trenches.  One  night,  shortly  before  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  German  cruisers,  I  thought 
that  I  should  like  to  see  how  these  were 
manned:  with  a  companion,  I  walked  among 
and  through  the  whole  of  them,  and,  save  for  a 
pair  of  lovers  strayed  from  the  park  in  the 
Valley,  I  did  not  meet  a  soul.  Now,  these 
childish  "protections"  were  quite  as  undefended 
during  the  bombardment  as  they  were  on  the 
night  of  my  visit :  there  was,  indeed,  no  means 
of  defending  them.  There  is,  it  is  true,  a  bar- 
racks on  Peasholme  Road ;  but  the  barracks  is 
a  place  of  itself;  it  is  not  in  the  town,  or,  for 
that  matter,  very  near  it;  the  barracks  is  not  a 
fort;  it  is  not  even  an  artillery-barracks;  and, 
although  the  carefully  calculated  fire  of  the 
Germans  showed  that  they  had  the  neighbor- 
hood exactly  mapped,  they  never  once  fired  in 
the  barracks'  direction.  In  all  Scarborough 
there  was  only  a  single  piece  of  cannon,  and 
that  was  a  spiked  relic  of  an  almost  forgotten 


174       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

war,  which  stood  as  a  curiosity  in  a  park  in  the 
heart  of  the  town  and  could  not  be  operated  if 
anybody  wanted  to  operate  it.  On  the  morn- 
ing of  the  raid,  the  population  consisted  solely 
of  the  civilian  inhabitants,  a  number  of  guests 
— mostly  invalids  or  valetudinarians — and  sev- 
eral hundred  girls  and  boys,  pupils  at  the  board- 
ing-schools. Scarborough,  I  repeat,  was  abso- 
lutely unfortified,  and  the  Germans,  showing 
by  their  fire  that  they  knew  all  about  the  town, 
showed  also  that  they  knew  this. 

Nor  could  the  wildest  imagination  seriously 
believe  Whitby  to  be  a  fortified  town.  All  the 
world  knows  that  it  is  no  more  than  a  pretty 
fishing-village,  flanked  by  a  small  group  of 
summer-hotels  and  curious  jet-shops.  On  the 
cliff  that  here  juts  into  the  North  Sea — that 
cliff  off  which,  last  Autumn,  the  hospital-ship 
Rohilla,  with  its  company  of  surgeons  and 
Red  Cross  nurses,  broke  in  pieces  and  lay  for 
three  days  while  survivors  braved  the  over- 
washing  waves — stands  a  small  coast-guard 
station — a  little  shack  to  shelter  a  couple  of 
watchers — and   the    remains    of    St.    Hilda's 


I  HE   "I'OUTIKK    VTloNJi      "I     ><    VK1IOROI  ',11 

"A  blackened  ruin  »ince  lha)  'lay  when  Bonny  I'm  irley 

marched  on  Prestonpoi 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     175 

Abbey,  one  of  the  finest  ruins  in  England, 
where,  on  the  lips  of  the  swine-herd  Caedmon, 
the  poetry  of  England  began.  Against  this 
formidable  city,  the  operations  of  two  German 
warships — one  battle-cruiser  and  one  ordinary 
cruiser — were  directed,  and  between  a  hundred 
and  a  hundred  and  fifty  shots  were  fired. 
Harmless  people  were  killed,  houses  were  de- 
molished :  the  ancient  abbey  did  not  escape. 

There  had  been  a  fortnight  of  gray  days, 
days  of  chill  and  rain  and  damp  stagnation.  A 
circular  wall  of  mist  shut  Scarborough  from 
all  the  world.  The  wall  crossed  Filey-road  on 
the  south,  Forge  Valley  on  the  west,  and 
Cloughton  on  the  north ;  on  the  east  it  rose  out 
of  the  sea. 

After  a  war-spoilt  season,  the  town  lay 
morosely  on  its  hill.  The  big  hotels  no  more 
than  stirred  in  their  winter  sleep;  the  shops 
barely  breathed.  Recruits  came,  were  swal- 
lowed by  the  barracks,  went  away;  out  at 
Cloughton,  Police  Constable  Chisholm  would 
occasionally  report  some  harmless  neutral  as  a 
German  spy;  soldiers  would  appear  from  the 


176       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

barracks,  fade  through  the  fog  and,  a  little 
later,  be  said  to  die — out  there;  but  in  Scar- 
borough nothing  vital  happened:  events  stood 
still. 

Sometime  between  seven  and  eight  o'clock 
on  the  dull  morning  of  the  sixteenth  of  Decem- 
ber, three  black  boats  nosed  through  the  fog. 
They  stood  in  for  Scarborough  and  came 
quietly  to  rest  before  it. 

Nobody  paid  any  attention  to  them.  The 
men  in  the  street-repair  gang  thought  the  boats 
were  English.  The  man  in  the  ocean-front 
room  of  the  big  hotel  yawned,  thanked  heaven 
that  he  did  not  have  to  get  up,  and  snored  again. 
The  pupils  at  the  girls'  schools  and  boys' 
schools  were  called  to  prayers  and  breakfast. 

But  there  must  have  been  some  change  in  the 
weather,  because,  quite  suddenly,  a  thunder- 
storm rattled  over  the  city.  There  was  a  good 
deal  of  lightning,  and  it  came  from  the  sea. 

Of  course  it  was  a  thunderstorm.  For  sev- 
eral minutes  everybody  was  sure  of  that. 
Thunderstorms  are  not  uncommon  along  the 
English  East  Coast  in  December.     Besides — 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     177 

there:  you  could  see  two  bolts  strike  the  out- 
lying wall  of  the  ruined  Castle ;  they  did  it  con- 
siderable damage.  Only  the  street-repair  gang 
had  a  different  opinion:  they  thought  that  com- 
rades were  throwing  rocks  at  them — for  two 
minutes  they  thought  that. 

No  longer.  At  the  end  of  two  minutes, 
Scarborough  stopped,  for  half  an  hour,  all 
thinking. 

A  circle  of  the  street,  ten  feet  in  diameter, 
rose  up  and  engulfed  the  repair-gang.  The 
room  next  that  occupied  by  the  gentleman  in 
the  ocean-front  apartment  exploded  and 
vanished.  Tiles  and  chimney-pots  pelted  the 
business-men  on  their  ways  to  shop  and  office, 
and  the  glass  from  hundreds  of  windows 
crashed  over  their  heads.  Breakfast  at  the 
young  ladies'  seminaries  and  boys'  academies 
ended  as  sections  of  the  schoolhouse  roof 
smashed  into  the  streets. 

It  was  precisely  thus  that  the  bombardment 
of  Scarborough  began.  Save  for  a  couple  of 
breathing-spaces,  precisely  thus  it  for  thirty 
minutes  continued. 


178       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

I  am  not  trying  to  tell  you  the  news  of  it; 
you  have  that  already — although  the  sapient 
censorship  did  its  best  to  stop  the  local  papers 
from  telling  the  citizens  just  how  much  their 
fellow-townsmen  and  neighbors  had  suffered. 
I  am  trying  to  tell  you  only  how  Scarborough 
felt  about  the  bombardment.  It  felt  exactly 
as  you  would  feel  if,  as  you  read  these  lines, 
the  book  blew  up,  burnt  your  face  and  killed  a 
woman  across  the  street. 

For  half  an  hour.  During  that  period — and 
it  seemed  half  a  year — the  black  boats  that  had 
come  from  the  sea  spat  fire  and  flung  six-inch 
and  twelve-inch  shells  over  all  the  city :  the  old 
town  had  heard  nothing  like  it  since  its  castle 
was  twice  beleaguered  during  the  Cromwellian 
wars ;  England  had  perhaps  known  nothing  like 
it  since  the  Dutch  fleet  swept  the  Channel ;  had 
certainly  known  nothing  like  it  since,  in  plain 
sight  of  the  spot  whence  those  shots  now  came, 
John  Paul  Jones  and  the  Bon  Homme  Richard 
made  prizes  of  the  Serapis  and  the  Countess  of 
Scarborough. 

Out  my  way,  which  is  "Cloughton  way,"  one 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     179 

could  have  it  all  for  the  looking :  my  one  handi- 
cap was  that  I  was  slow  to  begin  my  observa- 
tions. Being  a  sadly  uncivilized  American, 
and  therefore  still  accustomed  to  the  musketry- 
rattle  of  steam-heat,  the  roar  of  the  wind  in  the 
chimneys  of  my  house  had  provided  me  with  the 
certainty  of  a  bombardment  every  night  that  I 
passed  at  home  for  the  two  months  past.  So  I 
heard  this  morning's  real  cannonade  and 
heeded  it  not. 

Binns,  the  housekeeper,  came  up.  She  is  the 
traditional  English  housekeeper,  whose  like 
you  seldom  see  in  England,  or  anywhere  else 
for  that  matter,  save  on  the  American  stage. 
Her  voice  was  even,  her  manner  politely  stolid. 
Save  that  the  hour  was  slightly  after  eight 
o'clock,  she  might  have  been  announcing  the 
call  of  any  one  of  my  neighbors. 

"I  think  they  are  bombarding  Scarborough, 
sir,"  she  said. 

"Bombarding  Scarborough?"  I  repeated. — 
T  had  been  working  late  the  night  before  and 
was  only  half  awake.     "Who  are?" 

"Well,    sir" — she    was    all    politeness! — "I 


180       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

expect   it   would   be   the   Germans,   wouldn't 
it?" 

"Nonsense,  Binns !"  said  I. 

"Very  good,  sir.     Quite  so,  sir." 

She  turned  to  go. 

That  wind  in  the  chimney  was  uncommon 
loud  this  morning.     I  asked : 

"What  makes  you  think  there's  a  bombard- 
ment ?" 

"Jacques,  the  postman,  has  just  been  with  the 
letters,  sir.  He  saw  the  flashes  from  the  guns 
as  he  reached  the  garden-gate." 

"Jacques,"  said  I — our  postman  is  really  for- 
tunate enough  to  possess  that  Shakespearean 
surname,  and  audacious  enough  to  pronounce 
it  as  if  it  were  the  plural  of  "Jake" — "Jacques 
has  brought  that  news  a  dozen  times  before." 

Nevertheless,  I  went  into  my  workroom  to 
look. 

A  light  morning  mist  was  rising  like  a  thea 
ter-curtain   from   the   long   sweep   of   shore. 
The  skies  were  still  gray,  but  the  entire  south- 
ern stretch  of  coast,  all  the  way  past  Filey 
Brigg  to  the  white  front  of  Flamborough  Head, 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     181 

could  be  made  out.  There,  in  the  middle-dis- 
tance lay  Scarborough,  running  back  from  its 
pleasant  bays,  between  which  rose  the  minia- 
ture Gibraltar  surmountd  by  the  Castle's  ruin- 
ous keep — and  there,  close  in  to  shore,  lay  two 
dark  cruisers,  at  first  apparently  as  harmless  as 
any  fishing-craft. 

"English  boats,"  I  thought.  "English  cruis- 
ers were  thick  along  the  coast  all  yesterday." 

A  little  spurt  of  pale  smoke  came  out  of  one 
of  them. 

"Target-practice,"  I  assured  myself. 

But  even  as  I  did  so,  I  asked  the  question: 

"Target-practice  toward  the  shore?" 

I  ran  for  my  glasses.  I  had  scarcely  got  the 
focus  before  there  came  another  spurt  of  smoke 
— now  plainly  touched  with  fire. 

Another.     Then  another. 

I  followed  the  direction  of  one  shot  inland. 
It  must  have  been  an  explosive-shell.  I  saw  a 
white  puff  rise.  Binns  was  right;  the  always 
expected,  yet  always  unbelievable,  had  hap- 
pened :  the  Germans  were  bombarding  Scarbor- 
ough. 


182       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

I  watched  for  several  minutes,  horrified,  fas- 
cinated, curiously  incredulous.  Then,  realiz- 
ing that,  from  this  point,  one  shot  must  be 
precisely  like  its  fellows,  I  ordered  a  horse  out 
of  the  stable  and  got  into  town  faster,  I  am 
sure,  than  I  had  ever  gone  before. 

What  was  happening  in  Scarborough  the 
newspapers  have  long  «since  told.  From  one 
end  of  it  to  the  other,  the  shells  were  falling. 
Westborough,  as  the  central  portion  of  the 
chief  business  street  is  called,  was  full  of  dart- 
ing bits  of  iron;  men  and  women  had  dropped 
by  the  curb ;  to  north  and  south,  the  entire  city 
was  being  lashed  with  a  whip  of  iron  thongs. 

One  shot  fell  near  the  little  building  in  which 
the  coast-guards  find  shelter  during  those 
stormy  nights  when  they  keep  watch  for  smug- 
glers and  whence  they  start  to  rescue  ships  in 
distress:  the  life-savers  fled  just  in  time  to  save 
their  own  lives — the  next  shell  wrecked  the 
house.  Another  passed  directly  through  the 
round,  white  lighthouse  on  the  quay,  and  its 
successor  plowed  a  great  hole  in  a  field  close 
by  the  wireless-station,  two  miles  back.     Then 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     183 

came  a  crash  in  the  Crescent,  in  the  midst  of 
the  residence-district:  the  front  wall  of  a  house 
crumbled  away,  and  the  entire  interior  was  a 
mass  of  kindling.  Portions  of  roofing  danced 
through  the  air;  chimney-pots  flew  about  like 
so  many  kites.  The  shots  swung  toward  St. 
Nicholas  Parade  and  smashed  dwellings  there; 
they  ripped  away  two  stories  from  a  house  in 
Lonsdale  Road.  From  Castle  Hill  a  shell 
picked  up  the  ancient  iron  beacon — which,  cen- 
turies ago,  called  all  the  countryside  to  arms 
— and  flung  it  into  the  Castle  dykes.  A  veri- 
table cave,  nine  feet  in  diameter,  was  blown  in 
a  field  near  Stepney  Road.  Later,  men  found 
large  pieces  of  shrapnel  near  Cayton,  one  of 
the  Scarborough  municipal  pumping-stations, 
three  miles  south,  and  picked  up  more  at  East 
Ayton,  a  village  five  miles  inland. 

The  workhouse  was  struck:  one  inmate  was 
wounded,  and  a  pensioner  in  the  old  men's  ward 
was  half  buried  in  debris  as  he  knelt  in  fright- 
ened prayer.  A  conical  piece  of  metal  burst 
into  the  Roman  Catholic  church  <>f  St.  Columba 
and  left  a  gaping  aperture  in  the  wall.     In 


1 84       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

the  parish-church,  the  Archdeacon  was  cele- 
brating Holy  Communion  when  one  of  the  ear- 
liest shells  struck  the  roof. 

The  celebrant  paused. 

"It  appears,"  he  said  to  the  kneeling  congre- 
gation, "that  we  are  being  bombarded;  but  I 
think  that  we  shall  be  as  safe  here  as  any- 
where."—    And  he  went  on  with  the  service. 

A  few  minutes  later  a  shell  broke  over  the 
Municipal  School.  Several  early  pupils,  ar- 
rived from  the  country-districts  by  train, 
rushed  to  the  surrounding  houses  for  safety. 

A  few  of  the  fashionable  boarding-schools 
were  hit,  and  at  one  of  them — Queen  Mar- 
garet's, perhaps  the  best-known — there  oc- 
curred something  that  has  not  yet,  I  believe, 
become  "news."  When  the  bombardment  be- 
gan, the  governesses  and  tutors  at  nearly  all 
the  other  schools  took  their  pupils  to  the  cel- 
lars. Not  so  at  Queen  Margaret's.  The  au- 
thorities of  that  institution  ordered  their 
charges — all  young  girls — to  run  for  their 
lives,  and,  themselves  setting  the  pace,  charged 
a  mile  or  more  through  city  streets  and  along 


German  Shells  in  England 

"The  shots  ripped  away  two  stories  from  a  house  in  Lonsdali 

Road.' 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     185 

country  lanes  while  shells  burst  on  every-  side, 
kicked  up  the  dust  behind  them  and  rattled 
over  their  heads. 

A  young  girl  living  near  us — her  parents 
were  at  their  London  house — had  a  younger 
sister  at  this  school  and  felt  responsible  for  her 
safety.  At  the  start  of  the  bombardment,  she 
determined  to  motor  to  her  sister's  rescue. 
The  servants  tried  to  dissuade  her,  the  police 
to  turn  her  back:  both  failed.  She  reached  the 
school  safely  and  found  the  street-door  open. 

There  was  no  response  to  her  repeated  ring- 
ing of  the  bell ;  but  at  last  a  neighbor  thrust  a 
frightened  head  from  a  window. 

"There's  nobody  in  the  school,"  he  said. 
"They've  all  run  away.  I  think  I  heard  them 
call  out  that  they  were  going  to  try  to  run  to 
Seamer." 

To  Seamer,  the  nearest  village  south  of  Scar- 
borough, the  girl  sped  in  her  motor-car. 
There  she  was  told  that  "such  of  the  pupils  as 
got  there"  had  run  on  to  the  railway-station  a 
mile  or  more  away.  At  the  si  at  inn  the  word 
was  that  the  fugitive  pupils  had  been  hustled 


1 86       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

into  a  passing  train  for  London.  The  little 
motorist  returned  to  the  village  and  began  a 
house-to-house  canvass:  she  found  her  sister 
the  involuntary  guest  of  a  kindly  cottager. 

The  English  censor,  so  tender  of  our  emo- 
tions, has  permitted  the  publication  of  the  usual 
stories  of  miraculous  escapes,  and  most  of  the 
correspondents  have  fully  availed  themselves 
of  his  lenience.  Doubtless  you  have  already 
read  of  the  tenant  of  Gresham  House,  on  the 
North  Cliff,  who,  through  his  binoculars,  was 
watching  the  men  on  the  German  decks  when 
one  of  their  shots  scalped  his  residence. 
Doubtless,  too,  you  have  heard  of  the  shelled 
bookshop  wherein  the  only  injured  volume  was 
that  entitled  "Imperial  Germany."  There  was 
one  man  who  told  how  he  had  run  cellarward 
without  stopping  for  his  coat  and  returned,  an 
hour  later,  to  find  it  torn  to  shreds  in  his 
smashed  cupboard — a  narrative  presumably 
based  on  the  assumption  that  it  was  the  coat, 
and  not  the  cupboard,  which  had  been  fore- 
doomed. 


IRON  RAIX  AT  SCARBOROUGH     187 

These  incidents  composed  the  lighter  side  of 
the  raid,  and  it  is  as  well  that  there  was  a 
lighter  side,  for  all  the  other  sides  are  dark 
enough  and  to  spare. 

Of  them,  too,  when  the  censorship  was  per- 
force relaxed,  you  have  been  told.  You  know 
by  this  time  the  tragedies  of  that  iron  rain  from 
the  sea.  You  know  how  one  man  was  dress- 
ing in  his  bedroom  when  a  shell  burst  there 
and  killed  him;  how  two  servants  were  blown 
to  pieces  in  a  kitchen;  how  a  wife,  having 
rushed  to  her  husband's  side,  was  struck  and 
slaughtered,  while  her  husband  remained  un- 
harmed; how  a  woman  and  two  children  were 
crushed  in  the  ruins  of  one  house ;  how  another 
woman  ran  to  close  the  windows  of  her  shop 
and  met  a  shell  that  crashed  through  them; 
how  four  persons  were  killed  in  one  house  in 
Wykeman  Street;  and  how  others  were  picked 
up  dead  on  the  pavements. 

As  suddenly  as  it  had  begun,  the  firing 
ceased.  A  streak  of  light  appeared  in  the  sky 
to  the  southeast.     Before  it  the  mist  of  battle 


1 88        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

retreated,  and,  like  creatures  of  that  mist,  the 
black-nosed  boats  disappeared.  The  bombard- 
ment was  over. 

Instantly,  under  heavens  rapidly  brightening 
to  the  clearest  blue,  the  entire  appearance  of 
the  town  changed.  Policemen  came  from  no- 
where— nurses,  too.  A  rapidly  devised,  but 
thoroughly  efficient,  order  manifested  itself; 
the  crowds  that  swarmed  into  the  streets 
(chiefly  in  search  of  shell-mementoes,  wherein 
there  was  an  active  bull  market)  were  being 
quietly  marshaled;  companies  of  sweepers 
were  brushing  up  the  debris  (and  making  a  tidy 
penny  out  of  the  sale  of  the  bits  of  shell) ;  to- 
ward the  hospitals,  through  many  a  street, 
were  moving  little  processions  of  Boy  Scouts 
bearing  stretchers  on  which  lay  figures  swathed 
in  bloody  bandages,  the  faces  ashen,  the  eyes 
glazed.  .  .  .  You  would  have  thought  that  the 
remedy  for  the  effects  of  bombardment  was  a 
part  of  the  daily  routine  of  British  municipal 
authority. 

I  walked  for  some  hours  through  the  town 
that  I  had  known  during  four  years  of  its  pros- 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     189 

perity.  Tottering  chimneys,  tiles  trembling  on 
roof -edges,  rows  upon  rows  of  splintered  win- 
dows, roofs  open  to  the  sky,  brick  walls  crushed 
to  powder,  house-fronts  stripped  away,  and  the 
interiors  of  bedrooms  bare  to  the  sight  as  if 
they  were  stage  scenes  or  rooms  in  the  burning 
palace  of  Priam  as  /Eneas  last  saw  it:  these 
things  were  not  wrought  by  wind  in  the  chim- 
ney; they  were  no  suggestion  to  my  brain  from 
the  brain  of  Jacques  the  postman.  Nor  was 
this  a  fancy,  this  slow-stepping  procession  with 
a  stretcher  in  its  midst,  and  on  the  stretcher  a 
woman  dying.  .  .  . 

I  tramped  about  amid  the  crunching  glass 
and  crackling  slates.  I  stood  before  a  house 
where  iron  railings  had  been  uprooted,  twisted 
and  embedded  in  the  woodwork.  Small  pieces 
of  iron  rails,  neatly  severed,  were  scattered  with 
bits  of  uprooted  asphalt.  I  saw  all  the  horrors 
and  all  the  grotesque  deviltries  of  the  cannon- 
ade. 

And  I  saw  something  else:  either  that  day  or 
the  next,  I  saw  some  of  the  unexploded  and 
unbroken  projectiles  that  had  been  used  by  the 


190       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

Germans.  They  were  six-inch,  and  a  few 
twelve-inch,  shrapnel  and  penetrating  shells. 
The  shrapnel,  stuffed  with  bits  of  jagged  waste 
metal,  were  cones  quite  an  inch  in  thickness; 
they  bore,  around  and  across,  numerous  cuts  or 
indentations  so  that,  in  bursting,  the  missile 
would  divide  itself  into  squares  of  about  three- 
quarters  of  an  inch  in  size.  The  others  were 
smaller  missiles,  and  yet  it  was  one  of  these 
that,  striking  the  seafront  wall  of  the  Grand 
Hotel,  cut  through  the  bricks  as  if  they  had 
been  so  much  paper. 

Panic,  of  course,  there  had  been  while  those 
shells  were  falling,  all  stories  to  the  contrary 
notwithstanding:  there  is  no  town  in  the  world 
in  which  there  would  not  be  more  or  less  panic 
in  similar  circumstances.  A  portion  of  the 
exodus  of  the  more  timid  I  had  encountered  on 
my  hurried  way  into  town:  the  packed  trains, 
roads  crowded  with  motors  and  luggage-laden 
carriages,  byways  full  of  folk  afoot.  Here  was 
a  fat  man  panting  under  the  weight  of  two  suit- 
cases :  his  own  small  one  bumping  from  his  left 
hand,   his   wife's   large   one   from  his   right. 


IRON  RAIX  AT  SCARBOROUGH     191 

There  rolled  a  double-seated  landau  with  a  lit- 
tle chap  of  twenty  as  its  only  passenger,  and 
opposite  him  a  veritable  hill  of  luggage :  hand- 
bag and  kit-bag,  suit-case  and  jewel-case,  trunk, 
satchel  and  hat-box.  There  were  children 
astride  of  donkeys  once  rented  to  excursionists 
for  five  minutes'  ride  on  the  South  Sands; 
wives  still  in  the  aprons  that  they  had  been 
wearing  in  the  kitchen  when  the  first  shell  ex- 
ploded; collarless  husbands  in  smoking-jackets 
and  carpet-slippers;  even  a  few  late-rising 
children,  bare-footed  and  wrapped  in  blankets. 
The  highways  were  well  populated  that  morn- 
ing, and  the  railway-station  was  jammed  with 
a  clamoring  crowd.  In  a  small  way,  they  were 
beginning  to  understand  the  Belgians. 

And  yet,  even  this  flight  of  these  English 
folk  was  orderly.  Short  of  duration  it  was, 
too,  and  I  soon  found  that  nearly  everybody  ac- 
cepted the  situation  with  a  calm  that  was  amaz- 
ing to  my  American  consciousness.  It  was  an 
hysterical  woman  of  uncertain  age  that,  talking 
to  herself  (but  with  an  eye  to  possible  listeners) 
looked  at  one  scene  of  ruin  and  remarked:     "I 


192       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

don't  like  this  war;  it's  a  detestable  war.  I 
don't  like  it  at  all."  And  it  was  little  better, 
though  he  wore  male  garments,  that  I  saw  turn 
away  from  a  passing  stretcher  to  a  smashed 
chemist's  shop  and  groan:  "Do  you  know,  I 
believe  those  Germans  were  deliberately  trying 
to  destroy  property — deliberately  trying  to  de- 
stroy property,  by  Jove !" 

These  were  clearly  sightseers  from  other- 
where. They  began  to  come  in  from  York  and 
Huddersfield,  from  Leeds  and  even  from  Man- 
chester, as  soon  as  it  was  certain  that  the  raid 
was  over,  and  they  kept  on  arriving  and  look- 
ing and  departing  for  several  days.  Above  all, 
they  said,  they  wanted  to  know  "how  it  hap- 
pened," and  they  seemed  to  think  that  the  way 
to  come  by  that  knowledge  was  to  pry  among 
the  splintered  ruins.  One  of  them  I  heard  give 
voice  to  a  theory  that,  some  days  after  my  re- 
turn to  America,  I  saw  repeated  here.  It  first 
came  to  my  ears  in  Scarborough  on  a  day  some- 
where about  the  eighteenth  of  December ;  on  a 
day  about  the  twenty-third  of  January  I  saw  it 
printed  as  part  of  an  European  letter  in  the 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     193 

Chicago  Herald.  I  give  it  in  the  words  of  the 
latter: 

"The  English  Navy,  through  the  interven- 
tion of  nature,  narrowly  escaped  a  tremendous 
disaster  following  the  raid  on  Scarborough, 
Whitby  and  Hartlepool.  The  coast  attack 
was  a  marine  bait. 

"A  number  of  German  submarines  accom- 
panied the  Kaiser's  cruisers.  They  took  posi- 
tion, submerged,  along  the  line  of  retreat 
planned  by  the  German  ships.  The  expecta- 
tion was  that  the  British  ships  would  pursue, 
and  then  the  submarines  would  get  to  work. 
Pursuit  started,  but  an  impenetrable  fog  set- 
tled down,  saving  a  number  of  British  ships 
from  almost  certain  destruction." 

That  is  a  plausible  statement.  It  has  only 
one  flaw:  from  8:30  a.  m.  until  sunset,  the  six- 
teenth of  last  December  at  Scarborough,  and 
out  upon  the  North  Sea,  was  innocent  of  all 
fog;  it  was  a  bright  day  and  cloudless;  the 
night  was  clear  and  starlit. 

Already  I  have  twice  mentioned  the  censor. 
It  is  impossible  to  write  anything  of  England 


194       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

in  wartime  without  mentioning  him  frequently. 
I  used  sometimes  to  console  myself  for  his  re- 
strictions by  trying  to  imagine  what  it  is  that, 
if  the  English  censor  suppresses  the  truth,  the 
German  censor  utters.  Free,  however,  of  both 
officials  for  the  present,  I  feel  that  I  would  be 
doing  an  injustice  to  the  former  if  I  said 
nothing  of  his  attempted  siege  of  Scarbor- 
ough. 

I  was  not  aware  of  it  until  the  evening  of  the 
sixteenth.  By  some  means  or  other,  the  Lon- 
don Chronicle  had  got  a  message  to  me  during 
the  afternoon,  saying  that,  in  addition  to  the 
news  which  would  be  sent  it  by  a  member  of 
its  staff  dispatched  to  the  bombarded  city,  it 
would  like  a  thousand  words  from  me  describ- 
ing the  appearance  of  Scarborough  after  the 
attack.  I  went  into  the  postoffice,  where  the 
government-owned  telegraph  is  housed,  at 
about  six  o'clock  in  the  evening — nine  and  a 
half  hours  after  the  last  shell  of  the  Germans' 
five  hundred  had  fallen.  Remembering  the 
habits  of  my  newspaper-days,  a  decade  ago,  I 
asked  the  telegraph-clerk : 


IRON  RAIX  AT  SCARBOROUGH     195 

"How  soon  can  you  handle  a  thousand 
words?" 

The  clerk  looked  bewildered. 

"Would  to-morrow  do?" 

As  gently  as  I  could,  I  explained  to  him  that, 
odd  as  it  might  appear,  I  was  not  trying  to  tele- 
graph my  thousand  words  to  a  monthly  maga- 
zine, but  to  a  daily  paper. 

'Then  I  am  afraid  that  we  can't  help  you, 
sir,"  he  said;  "news-material  is  not  to  be  given 
preference,  and  we  have  only  just  begun  to 
handle  messages  handed  in  at  noon." 

Thinking  that  the  Scarborough  Mercury 
might  have  a  private  wire  to  London,  I  went  to 
the  office  of  that  local  newspaper.  There  the 
managing-editor  sat  with  his  arms  outspread 
on  his  desk  and  his  head  in  his  hands,  all  about 
him  neat  piles  of  manuscript,  each  bearing  the 
evidences  of  careful  editing  and  each  weighted 
with  a  bit  of  metal. 

"A  private  wire?"  he  repeated  in  answer  to 
my  question.  He  did  not  raise  his  despondent 
head.  "No,  we  haven't  a  private  wire;  the 
Government  would  not  permit  it." 


196       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

"You  don't  seem  well,"  I  began.  "Is  there 
anything  the  matter?" 

He  waved  a  feeble  hand  toward  those  piles 
of  manuscript. 

"Everything  is  the  matter,"  he  moaned. 
"Here's  this  town  bombarded — the  first  real 
German  attack  on  English  soil  since  the  war 
began.  A  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  pounds' 
worth  of  damage  done.  Whole  houses  de- 
stroyed. People  killed.  Hospitals  full  of 
wounded.  Population  in  panic.  Everybody 
crazy  to  get  the  lists  of  the  hurt.  My  God, 
man,  it's  the  one  thing  that's  happened  in  Scar- 
borough since  Cromwell  stormed  the  Castle; 
and  do  you  know  what's  the  only  news  the 
Censor  will  let  me  print?  It's  this:  'A  Ger- 
man ship  fired  a  few  shells  into  Scarborough 
to-day;  the  situation  is  developing!'  " 

Only  the  arrival  of  wounded  fugitives  from 
the  East  Coast  at  King's  Cross  spread  the  news 
in  London  and  forced  the  censorship  to  let  the 
Scarborough  papers  print  the  truth  at  9:30 
p.  M.  For  my  part,  I  sent  my  manuscript  by 
post :  so  heavily  had  the  few  telegraphed  details 


IRON  RAIN  AT  SCARBOROUGH     197 

been  cut  that  my  version  was  welcomed  in  Lon- 
don forty-eight  hours  after  the  event. 

Meanwhile,  my  news  had  ceased  to  be  news: 
Scarborough,  if  it  had  not  already  recovered, 
was  at  least  again  upon  its  feet  and  in  the  ring. 
It  made  me  recall  the  old  proverb  of  "A  Scar- 
borough Warning" — that  is  to  say,  "A  word 
and  a  blow,  but  the  blow  first."  The  town 
which  can  make  such  a  phrase  current  through 
the  centuries  has  proven  itself  able  to  accept 
that  phrase  when  made  a  reality  and  used 
against  it.  Scarborough  and  Whitby,  unforti- 
fied, defenseless,  had  been  attacked  in  defiance 
of  all  the  laws  of  war;  but  Scarborough  and 
Whitby — and,  through  them,  all  England — had 
learned  completely  Belgium's  lesson  and  Great 
Britain's  need. 


VIII 

BELGIUM    IN    ENGLAND 

When  the  war  began,  the  English  Government 
said  that  it  recognized  its  duty  to  the  Govern- 
ment of  Belgium ;  shortly  after  the  war  began, 
the  English  people  came  to  a  whole-hearted 
realization  of  their  duty  to  the  Belgian  people. 
By  that  time  there  were  three  hundred  thou- 
sand Belgians  in  England.  One  might  almost 
say  that  another  nation  had  been  set  down 
among  the  English — a  nation  of  different  cus- 
toms, different  creed  and  different  speech: 
three  hundred  thousand  penniless  men  crippled 
by  age,  wounds  or  disease;  destitute  women, 
whose  husbands  had  died  across  the  sea,  whose 
sons,  brothers,  lovers,  were  lost  to  them;  chil- 
dren, mostly  orphaned  and  all  with  none  to  feed 
them.  These  composed  the  problem  that  Eng- 
land had  to  solve. 

She  set  to  work  to  solve  it  beautifully,  and 

198 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         199 

though  the  influx  seemed  never  to  lessen,  her 
courageous  charity  but  grew  with  the  increase 
of  its  burdens.  We  hear  a  great  deal,  and 
much  in  justice,  of  the  rigidity  of  the  English 
character  and  its  inability  to  adapt  itself  to  the 
characteristics  of  other  nations:  that  rigidity 
became  flexibility.  We  hear  a  great  deal,  with 
less  reason,  of  English  coldness:  if  that  ever 
existed,  this  new  heat  of  generosity  has  melted 
it  completely  away.  Apart  from  all  question 
of  the  origin  of  the  dreadful  war,  apart  from 
all  question  of  the  rights  and  wrongs  of  the 
armed  controversy,  the  people  of  England,  in 
their  welcome  to  the  Belgian  non-combatant 
refugees,  in  their  unselfish  and  self-sacrificing 
care  of  them,  have  done  and  are  doing  some- 
thing that  must  forever  command  the  respect 
of  the  whole  world. 

This  is  no  place  to  catalogue,  still  less  to  de- 
scribe, the  hundred-and-one  clubs,  guilds,  so- 
cieties, funds,  foundations,  the  legion  of  every 
sort  of  organization,  immediately  formed  and 
systematically  maintained  for  the  purposes  of 
assistance  to  the  Belgian  refugees:  the  titles 


200       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

and  work  of  those  organizations  have  all,  long 
ago,  been  given  and  explained  in  the  American 
press.  Nor  shall  I  attempt  to  show  how  money 
was  easily  raised  and  wisely  expended — raised 
by  the  organizations,  the  newspapers,  the 
churches,  schools,  cities,  towns  and  villages ;  by 
scores  of  individuals;  by  personal  solicitation, 
advertisements,  circular,  sermon,  lecture,  ba- 
zaar, countryside  concert,  metropolitan  dance, 
quiet  self-denial;  by  the  school-boys'  half-pen- 
nies, the  poor  man's  gladly  offered  tithe,  the  rich 
man's  check.  All  that  I  wish  to  make  clear  is 
that,  without  stopping  to  argue  that  native  needs 
had  closer  claims — giving,  in  point  of  fact,  more 
to  native  needs  than  it  ever  gave  before — the 
whole  of  England  contributed  and  continued 
contributing  to  the  Belgians.  In  his  "Frederick 
the  Great,"  Carlyle,  by  one  of  his  masterly 
figures  of  speech,  shows  us  the  unpaid  Prussian 
army  standing  at  review  with  its  pockets  turned 
inside-out:  England,  with  those  three  hundred 
thousand  dispossessed  Belgians  on  her  shores, 
herself  voluntarily  emptied  her  pockets  for 
them. 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         201 

Money  was  the  least  of  it.  The  rich  con- 
verted their  houses  into  Belgian  hostels,  as  the 
refuges  for  Belgian  civilians  were  popularly 
called;  the  poor  worked  without  pay  for  the 
Belgians'  needs.  I  know  a  girl  who  has  an 
"Hon."  before  her  name,  who,  now  that  her 
father  has  converted  his  countryplace  into  a 
Belgian  hostel,  sweeps  its  floors.  There  is  a 
Master  of  the  Supreme  Court  who  scrubs  the 
steps  of  a  Belgian  hostel  at  Ealing.  The  wife 
of  one  of  the  Cloughton-folk  whose  title  is 
among  the  oldest  in  England  spent  an  entire 
day,  when  her  baby  was  scarcely  a  month  old, 
stopping  every  passing  motor-car  and  selling 
to  the  driver  of  each  nosegays  for  the  local  Bel- 
gian relief  fund.  In  the  same  village,  the 
daughter  of  a  cottager,  a  girl  for  two  years 
bedridden,  dressed  dolls  and  sold  them  for  the 
same  purpose.  I  know  an  out-of-work  gar- 
dener who  gave  a  third  of  his  small  savings, 
and  a  workman  earning  only  twenty  shillings  a 
week  who  gave  a  half-crown  to  the  Belgian 
fund  on  every  Saturday  night.  These  in- 
stances are  a  few  out  of  my  own  experience; 


202       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

there  is  nobody  in  England  that  could  not  add 
to  them  and  multiply  them. 

Somebody  with  more  wit  than  sentiment  has 
said  that  when  Englishmen  fly  to  arms,  English 
women  fly  to  their  knitting-needles,  and  a 
friend  of  mine  in  the  army  tells  me  that  the 
British  soldier  in  the  French  trenches  heartily 
welcomes  the  "cholera-belts"  that  the  English 
women  knit  for  him  by  the  hundred,  because  he 
finds  those  belts  so  useful  for  cleaning  his  rifle. 
Both  of  these  statements  are  true;  but  neither, 
it  seems  to  me,  lessens  the  value  of  the  English 
women's  knitting.  Certainly,  the  mere  belief 
that  they  are  helping  helps  the  legion  of  women 
who  must  needs  otherwise  become  nervous 
wrecks  from  idly  brooding  on  the  dangers  that 
their  menfolk  are  enduring;  certainly  the  knit- 
ted socks,  wristlets  and  "Balaclava-caps"  are 
sadly  required  and  gladly  used  for  the  purposes 
for  which  they  are  intended ;  and  certainly,  the 
full  half  of  this  knitting,  going  as  it  does  to  the 
Belgian  refugees,  finds  a  ready  gratitude 
among  the  destitute  who  have  been  driven  from 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         203 

their  homes  with  no  clothes  save  those  which 
they  were  wearing  when  they  ran  away. 

Women  take  their  knitting  to  the  theater: 
you  can  see  the  needles  flashing  in  pit  and  stalls, 
in  the  gallery  and  boxes.  Women  take  their 
knitting  out  to  dinner :  I  have  seen  it  in  the  res- 
taurant of  the  Carlton;  more  times  than  not, 
when  I  have  dined  in  an  Englishman's  house 
since  the  war  began,  we  men,  upon  our  return 
to  the  drawing-room,  found  our  hostess  and  all 
her  women-guests  engaged  in  this  work  for  the 
Belgian  Relief  foundation.  It  is  going  on  in 
every  part  of  the  island,  this  work,  and  in  every 
class  of  society;  in  my  own  village  I  have  seen 
the  cottager  in  her  kitchen  knitting  socks  for 
the  Belgians  and  the  daughters  of  a  baron  in 
their  library  knitting  mufflers  for  the  Belgians. 
The  cook  in  the  hospital-kitchen  knitted  be- 
tween meals  for  them,  and  a  Belgian  convales- 
cent, a  broad-faced  Fleming,  smilingly  thanked 
her,  in  appropriate  gestures,  for  looking  after 
his   stomach   and   his    feet.     Crossing  on   the 

I  ranconia,  when  I  returned  home,  was  Kather- 


204       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

ine  Goodson,  the  pianist,  on  her  way  to  start 
her  annual  American  tour:  she  was  so  busy 
knitting  that  she  had  scarcely  time  to  practice; 
her  husband,  Arthur  Hinton,  the  composer,  had 
to  take  her  knitting  from  her  in  order  to  hurry 
her  into  the  customs-shed  when  the  vessel 
docked  at  New  York. 

Men  and  boys,  unable  otherwise  to  help,  or 
helping  this  way  among  other  ways,  have  taken 
up  the  needle :  at  one  of  England's  best  known 
public  schools  the  most  manly  of  the  boys,  the 
leaders  in  athletics,  organized  knitting-classes 
and  sent  the  products  of  their  leisure  to  Belgian 
refugees.  An  acquaintance  of  mine  asked  his 
son  what  he  wanted  for  a  Christmas  present, 
and  received  the  reply:  "Wool,  to  knit  for  my 
Belgians,  and  boodle  to  buy  more  wool  with." 
Once,  when  the  women  had  left  the  table  in  a 
large  London  house,  and  the  men  turned  to 
their  cigars  and  port,  one  of  the  men  produced 
a  pair  of  needles  and  some  yarn. 

"You  gentlemen  will  pardon  me,"  he  said, 
unsmiling.     "I've  given  up  tobacco  and  taken 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         205 

to  this.  It  may  help  the  Belgians,  and  it  keeps 
me  occupied." 

That  man  was  a  Judge  more  feared  by  crim- 
inals than  any  other  judge  upon  the  English 
bench. 

The  Boy  Scouts  came  in  for  considerable 
criticism  before  the  war,  but  have  been  both 
useful  and  willing  in  their  service  to  refugees 
— though  sometimes  a  little  more  the  latter  than 
the  former.  At  a  refugees'  hostel  near  Lon- 
don, one  was  always  kept  on  duty  at  the  door  to 
prevent  the  entrance  of  the  inquisitive  and  to 
block  the  possible  prying  of  German  spies,  who 
have  been  known  to  seek  at  these  hostels  such 
information  concerning  the  Belgian  army's 
losses  and  temper  as  can  be  picked  up  there. 
Asked  how  he  discriminated,  the  little  door- 
keeper replied: 

"If  a  visitor  comes  arsking  for  a  Belgian  an' 
carn't  tell  wot  'is  business  is,  I  s'y  the  Belgian's 
not  at  'ome.  If  the  person  keeps  a'comin'  back, 
I  sends  up  word  to  the  Belgian  an'  arsks  does 
*e  want  to  see  'im." 


206       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

"But  suppose  the  visitor  speaks  French? 
You  don't  speak  French,  do  you?" 

"No,"  was  the  scornful  rejoinder;  "I  don't 
speak  none  of  them  foreign  languages,  I  don't. 
But  if  the  visitor  talks  somethink  I  carn't  un- 
derstand, I  know  'e  must  be  a  Belgian  an'  so  I 
shows  'im  right  in." 

This  kindly  concern  for  the  refugees  and  in- 
valids was  not  without  its  amusing  phases.  I 
remember  being  at  the  house  of  a  country  doc- 
tor when  there  came  a  long-awaited  telegram 
asking  how  many  convalescing  Belgian  soldiers 
he  could  next  day  house  in  his  improvised  hos- 
pital. The  doctor  had  long  wanted  this  chance 
to  help,  but,  when  it  came,  he  lost  his  head  com- 
pletely. 

"I  suppose  I  had  better  just  answer:  'Yes, 
fifteen,' "  he  suggested. 

I  pointed  out  that  the  telegram  of  inquiry 
must  be  one  of  many,  and  that  unless  he  made  it 
fuller  and  signed  it,  the  medical  officer  to  whom 
his  answer  was  addressed  would  not  under- 
stand it. 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         207 

"You  write  it,"  said  the  doctor,  "and  hand  it 
in  as  you  pass  the  post-office.  Here's  a  shil- 
ling to  pay  for  it." 

"It  doesn't  have  to  be  paid  for,"  I  said. 
"It's  an  O.H.S.  message."—  That  is,  "On  His 
Majesty's  Service." 

That  evening  the  doctor  was  busy,  and  with 
large  results.  Next  day,  to  meet  the  train  that 
bore  the  patients,  and  to  convey  them  to  the  hos- 
pital, he  had  two  motor-cars  and  three  stretch- 
ers. He  himself  appeared  in  full  Red  Cross 
uniform;  he  had  a  trio  of  his  local  Red  Cross 
women-nurses,  in  cap  and  apron,  beside-  him, 
and  behind,  drawn  up  in  ordered'  ranks  about 
their  stretchers,  the  twenty  men  of  the  village 
who  composed  its  Red  Cross  ambulance- 
corps. 

Out  of  the  train  stepped  the  fifteen  patients. 
They  were,  as  the  telegram  of  inquiry  had  said, 
convalescent,  and,  except  for  four  who  took  ad- 
vantage of  the  motor-cars,  they  all  walked  to 
the  hospital. 

Of  the  stories  that  I  heard  from  Belgian 


208       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

refugees  in  England  I  have  already  published 
some  elsewhere;  more,  I  dare  say,  have  been 
previously  recorded  by  other  hands.  Only  a 
few  I  shall  here  repeat. 

I  think  I  am  correct  in  saying  that  one  of  the 
first,  if  indeed  not  quite  the  first,  parties  of 
war-driven  Belgians  to  land  in  England  was 
that  party  of  Belgian  soldiers  who  were 
brought  to  Folkestone  by  the  French  steamer 
he  Nord  well  along  in  August.  There  were 
eighty  of  these  soldiers,  all  military  cyclists,  the 
sole  survivors  of  a  command  two  hundred  and 
forty  strong  that  had  been  reduced  to  its  pres- 
ent proportions  by  the  fighting  about  Namur. 
These  survivors,  every  one  of  whom  marvel- 
ously  had  his  bicycle  with  him,  had  somehow 
managed  to  escape  into  French  territory  and 
had  so  made  their  way  to  Dunkirk.  They  were 
given  a  meal  at  Folkestone  and  were  then  sent 
on  to  Thorncliffe  Camp  for  a  short  rest  before 
returning  to  the  front — all  except  one  or  two 
poor  fellows  who,  rather  badly  wounded,  were 
separated  from  their  companions  and  shipped  to 
hospitals. 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         209 

Save  for  the  fact  that  they  were  then  a  nov- 
elty, there  was  nothing  remarkable  about  these 
passengers  of  Le  Nord.  What,  however,  was 
chiefly  to  be  noted  in  their  talk  was  what,  later, 
I  came  to  find  in.  the  talk  of  all  the  Belgian  sol- 
diers that  I  met  with :  a  calm  toleration  for  the 
German  fighting-man  and  a  hot  hatred  for  the 
Prussian  war-machine. 

Indeed,  among  all  the  wounded  Belgian  sol- 
diers that  I  talked  with,  either  in  Belgium  or 
England,  I  had  to  search  long  before  coming 
upon  any  sign  of  personal  bitterness  against 
the  rank  and  file  of  the  Germans  considered  as 
individuals.  These  Belgian  military-men — 
officers  and  privates,  but  especially  the  latter — 
had,  nearly  every  one  of  them,  the  soundest 
sort  of  philosophy:  that  philosophy  which 
comes  from  practical  experience  of  the  subject 
philosophized  about.  It  was  a  former  cafe- 
waiter  in  Brussels,  one  of  the  defenders  of  Na- 
mur,  who  put  the  case  clearest  to  me: 

"In  a  conquered  town,"  said  he,  "these  Ger- 
man soldiers  go  mad,  and  that  is  terrible.  But 
first  some  one  had  to  send  them  forth  to  con- 


210        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

quer  and  go  mad,  and  that  is  more  terrible 
Still." 

The  Belgian  hates  Prussian  militarism  for 
what  it  has  done  to  Belgium  and  the  Belgians; 
but  he  knows  that  his  remedy  lies  in  collective 
resistance  and  not  in  individual  reprisal. 

To  this  the  only  exception  that  I  discovered, 
I  came  across  close  to  my  own  home — in  the 
ward  of  Lord  Airedale's  hospital  at  Cober  Hill, 
Cloughton.  There,  among  the  first  batch  of 
Belgian  wounded  to  arrive,  was  one  young  man 
that  scarcely  ever  spoke,  even  to  his  comrades. 
He  was  very  young  of  body,  but  his  face  was 
old.  All  night,  the  nurses  said,  he  lay  awake, 
staring  at  the  ceiling;  all  day  he  stood  by  a  win- 
dow looking  out  across  the  blue  North  Sea. 

"You  see  that  man  ?"  said  one  of  his  fellows. 
"He  wants  to  get  well  quick  and  fight  again. 
He  wants  to  kill  Germans  with  his  own  two 
hands,  and  to  die  killing  them.  He  lived  at 
Rotselaer,  and  there,  his  wife  having  died,  he 
left  his  little  son,  a  boy  six  years  old.  That 
little  boy  a  German  soldier  killed  for  him." 

My  informant's  voice  was  loud  enough  for 


X 

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>  '  r. 

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pq 

<  a: 


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BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         211 

the  father  to  hear;  but  he  gave  no  token  of 
heeding:  he  kept  his  eyes  to  the  window,  look- 
ing out  across  the  blue  North  Sea. 

Mostlyj  I  found,  the  war  had  come  as  so 
much  of  a  surprise  to  these  Belgians  that  they 
had  not  ceased  thinking  of  Germany  as  Bel- 
gium's protective  elder  brother  before  German 
shells  were  blowing  Belgian  heads  off.  "So 
quickly,"  sighed  a  soldier  that  I  talked  with  in 
one  hospital — a  piece  of  shrapnel  had  torn  his 
leg — "it  all  came  so  quickly!  I  was  a  clerk  in 
Antwerp,  and  we  were  given  but  one  hour's 
warning.  Think  of  it:  one  hour  in  which  to 
say  good-by,  perhaps  forever,  to  one's  wife  and 
little  children!  We  expected  no  war;  but  like 
that  the  Germans  came  upon  us.  I  was  at 
work  in  the  shop;  four  hours  later  I  was  fight- 
ing at  Liege." 

Other  sorts  of  stories  one  came  across,  and 
is  glad  to  be  able  to  set  down  here.  To  the 
military  hospital  at  Lincoln,  which  is  but  a  few 
hours'  ride  from  Scarborough,  there  was 
brought  a  thrice-wounded  Belgian  soldier. 
He  was  more  anxious  to  know  of  his  parents' 


212       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

welfare  than  to  tell  them  of  his  own  condition. 
Therefore,  since  he  had  the  strength  to  write 
only  a  few  lines,  the  note  that  he  addressed  to 
them  contained  merely  a  word  concerning  his 
whereabouts  and  his  hurts,  and  was  otherwise 
devoted  entirely  to  inquiries.  The  one  chance 
in  a  thousand  happened :  somebody  able  to  get 
through  the  first  German  lines  took  that  note 
and  others  with  him,  handed  it  to  somebody 
else,  who  could  enter  Liege,  where  our  soldier's 
father  and  mother  lived,  and  so  it  reached  its 
destination. 

The  old  couple  were  penniless ;  leagues  of  an- 
gry sea  and  miles  of  devastated  country  occu- 
pied by  an  enemy's  soldiery,  lay  between  them 
and  Lincoln.  Their  age  would  have  made  the 
journey  dangerous  in  times  of  peace;  in  these 
times  it  threatened  starvation  by  the  wayside 
and  death  by  rope  or  rifle,  should  suspicion  be 
aroused  in  any  of  the  thousands  of  invaders 
among  whose  camps  the  route  lay.  Neverthe- 
less, that  father  and  mother,  thinking  only  of 
their  son  wounded  in  a  foreign  land,  resolved 
to  go  to  him. 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND        213 

They  borrowed  a  wheelbarrow  from  one 
neighbor  and  rilled  it  with  potatoes  borrowed 
from  another  friend.  The  old  man  pushed  the 
barrow  before  him,  his  wife  trudging  at  his 
side.  In  their  peasants'  costumes,  they  every- 
where posed  as  persons  returning  to  their 
home,  which  was  always  in  the  village  next 
ahead.  A  series  of  miracles  protected  them: 
the  potatoes  were  not  seized;  the  travelers  were 
not  once  suspected;  fellow  Belgians  fed  them; 
they  slept  in  ditches  and  in  fields;  they  even 
crossed,  unmolested,  the  frontier.  Their  one 
guide  was  now  their  son's  note,  hidden  in  the 
old  woman's  stocking;  but  fortune  remained 
kindly:  a  man  with  a  heart  paid  their  passage 
to  England,  and  they  found  their  son  recover- 
ing in  the  Lincoln  hospital. 

To  a  hospital  that  I  frequently  visited  a  limp- 
ing Tommy  was  sent.  The  nurses  had  been 
doing  a  little  harmless  hero-worshiping  before 
the  Belgian  soldiers,  who  were  the  only  other 
patients;  now  the  Belgians,  all  men  that  had 
suffered  severe  wounds  in  the  heaviest  fighting 
of  the  war's  early  days,  clustered  about  the 


214       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

newcomer.  The  one  English-speaking  Belgian 
began,  on  behalf  of  his  fellows,  an  eager  inter- 
rogation :  they  all  wanted  to  hear  the  English- 
man's accounts  of  battle. 

"  'Ow  was  it  ?"  asked  the  self-appointed  in- 
terpreter. 

"  'Ow  was  wot?"  Tommy  sullenly  coun- 
tered. 

"The  battle." 

"Wot  battle?" 

The  interpreter  was  disconcerted,  but  not 
permanently  so. 

"De  battle  where  you  was  'it,"  he  explained. 

"My  wound  ain't  nothink,"  said  Tommy  with 
a  darkly  conscious  modesty. 

"Butyouarehurted?" 

"Course  I  am." 

"In  foot?" 

"Yes:  carn't  you  see  I'm  limpin'?" 

"Schwapnel?" 

"Wot?" 

"Schwapnel.  Was  wot  'it  you  foot  schwap- 
nel?" 

"No." 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         215 

"No  ?    Den  maybe  a  r-r-rifle-bullet  ?" 

"No,  nor  it  wasn't  no  lydite  bomb,  nor  no 
forty-two-centimeter  shell,  neither." 

"And  not  schwapnel?"  persisted  the  inter- 
preter. 

The  Tommy  suddenly  shook  his  fist  under  the 
Belgian  soldier's  nose. 

"Now,  don't  you  try  an'  'ave  your  little  joke 
with  me,"  he  thundered.  "I  knows  your  sort 
o'  merry  jester,  I  does ;  an'  I  won't  take  no  non- 
sense from  'im !" 

With  that  he  turned  and  stalked  out  of  the 
room  with  as  much  dignity  as  his  foot  would 
allow,  leaving  an  amazed  company  behind  him. 
Amazed,  but  admiring,  too:  they  had  always 
heard  how  Englishmen  scorned  to  talk  of  their 
battle-scars,  and  here  was  a  noble  example. 

They  were  not  disillusioned  until  they 
learned  the  whole  truth :  the  man  was  a  Terri- 
torial; he  had  never  been  outside  of  England; 
he  had  tripped  over  a  tent-post  and  sprained  his 
ankle. 

I  remember,  too,  a  wounded  soldier  in  a  Red 
Cross  hospital  in  which  my  wife  was  working 


216       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

in  December,  who  had  said  good-by  to  his  wife 
in  August  and  had  heard  nothing  from  her  or 
of  her  since.  All  that  he  knew  was  that  the 
village  in  which  he  left  her  was  afterwards 
burned  to  the  ground,  and  that  many  of.  its 
women  perished  with  it.  One  day  he  came  to 
his  nurse  with  a  bit  of  shaking  newspaper  in 
his  trembling  hand. 

That  bit  of  paper  he  had  torn  from  a  copy 
of  the  London  'Daily  Sketch.  It  contained  a 
photograph,  taken  on  a  refugee-ship,  of  a 
group  of  Belgian  refugees.  There  was 
nothing  in  the  accompanying  text  to  tell  where 
the  photograph  had  been  taken,  or  whither  the 
boat  on  which  it  was  taken  had  been  bound; 
but  one  face  in  the  foreground  was  especially 
clear :  the  face  of  a  young  woman. 

"Look,  look!"  gasped  the  soldier,  while  frank 
tears  ran  down  his  cheeks.  "It  is  she !  It  is 
my  wife.  She  does  not  know  that  I  live;  but, 
somewhere  she  is  alive." 

We  counted  that  man  tucky,  for  in  a  nearby 
cot  lay  a  comrade  whose  first  news  of  his  wife 
since  the  third  of  August  reached  him  three 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         217 

months  later  and  told  him  that  a  German  shell 
had  maimed  her  for  life  on  October  eighth. 

After  the  arrival  of  Le  Nord,  Belgian  sol- 
diers were  brought  to  England  almost  daily. 
"I  never  knew  there  were  so  many  soldiers  in 
Belgium,"  one  tired  little  nurse  said  to  me ;  and 
it  really  seemed  at  times  as  if  every  ranker  in 
the  Belgian  army  had  been  wounded  and  every 
wounded  ranker  brought  to  England. 

The  civilian  refugees,  however,  never  be- 
came a  commonplace;  one  might  as  well  talk 
of  being  bored  by  the  sight  of  torture.  Day 
after  day  they  came,  and  day  after  day  Eng- 
land, desperately  pressed  as  she  was  by  her 
own  cares,  found  food  and  clothes  and  shelter 
for  them.  Each  boatload  brought  its  own  ap- 
peal ;  it  would  be  easy  to  fill  three  volumes  such 
as  this  one  with  their  stories,  and  every  story 
a  separate  pull  upon  the  heartstrings;  but  the 
story  of  the  arrival  of  a  single  boatload  must 
serve. 

Nr.bndy,  I  think,  can  ever  forget  it  who  saw 
the  arrival  at  Tilbury  of  the  first  contingent  of 
civilian  refugees  from  Antwerp  and  its  sur- 


218       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

rounding  villages.  The  British  Government 
had  chartered  the  Great  Eastern  Railway  Com- 
pany's boat,  Copenhagen,  to  bring  a  thousand 
and,  in  the  twilight  of  that  autumnal  evening, 
a  little  company  stood  in  the  dreary  landing- 
shed,  waiting  the  arrival  of  the  steamer. 
There  was  a  representative  of  the  Local  Gov- 
ernment Board;  there  was  Commander  Coyst, 
of  the  railway.  Behind  waited  the  special  train 
for  the  Liverpool-street  Station,  where  Sir 
Arthur  Downes  and  Inspector  Oxley,  also  of 
the  Local  Government  Board,  would — with  a 
committee  of  women,  a  staff  of  physicians  and 
nurses,  and  a  troop  of  Boy  Scouts  to  carry  the 
babies  and  such  small  belongings  as  the 
refugees  might  bring  with  them — meet  the 
nation's  guests  and  feed  and  house  them 
in  the  Board's  converted  asylums  at  Edmon- 
ton. 

Five  o'clock  struck,  but  the  Copenhagen  had 
not  yet  appeared.  Five-thirty,  and  one  of  the 
clearer  sighted  picked  her  out  from  the  craft 
in  the  river.  Everybody  went  down  the  gang- 
way to  the  landing-stage.     At  six  o'clock  the 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND        219 

Copcnliagoi    was    ready    to    disembark    her 
freight  of  fugitives. 

Instead  of  the  expected  thousand,  there  were 
only  two  hundred  and  seventy  in  this  first  con- 
signment; but  no  man  could  look  on  that  little 
company  and  remain  unmoved.  They  were, 
for  the  most  part,  of  the  poorest  peasantry: 
some  citizens  of  Malines,  more  cottagers  from 
Compenhout,  Hever,  Bucken,  Rotselaer  and 
Jette.  They  had  left  behind  them  in  ruins  all 
that  they  had  ever  known  of  the  comforts,  even 
all  that  they  had  of  the  necessities,  of  life; 
there  was  not  one  that  had  not  lost  everything 
he  held  most  dear.  Childless  gaffers,  widowed 
women,  orphaned  children,  they  crowded  to  the 
rail,  a  ship-load  of  tragedies.  In  nearly  every 
case,  the  man  upon  whom  rested  the  burden  of 
their  subsistence  had  been  swallowed  up  in  the 
war.  In  many  instances  there  were  old  fathers 
who  had  lost  their  daughters,  mothers  who  had 
lost  their  children — none  knowing  where  or 
how — in  the  awful  turmoil  of  that  last  Stam- 
pede from  burning  towns  and  along  shell- 
bespattered  highways.     With  hands  and  faces 


220       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

travel-stained  and  tear-stained,  their  clothes 
torn  and  ragged,  many  barefoot,  more  hatless, 
their  paltry  rescued  belongings  wrapped  in 
grotesque  bundles  of  towels  or  newspapers, 
table-cloths  or  sheets,  the  eyes  of  each  had  that 
intensity  of  expression  which  comes  only  from 
looking  long  on  horror;  and  yet  now,  with  a 
new  light  painfully  struggling  in  them,  they 
bent  their  gaze  on  this  river-shore  in  the  land 
that  offered  them — rest.  Some  one  among 
them  proposed  a  "cheer  for  England" :  I  think 
the  pathos  of  those  broken  voices  responding 
to  that  proposal  is  without  equal  in  history. 

They  came  ashore,  one  old  man  kneeling  and 
kissing  the  friendly  soil.  The  waiting  party  of 
Englishmen,  with  the  boisterousness  that  hides 
an  Englishman's  tender  emotions,  fairly  looted 
the  station-buffet  for  them.  Within  half  an 
hour,  the  train  was  bearing  them  to  Liverpool 
Street. 

Two  priests  came  with  that  party:  Pere 
Butaye  and  Pere  van  Heybuck,  members  of  the 
Redemptionist  Order.  Perhaps  the  investi- 
gators that  find  no  final  proof  of  "atrocities  by 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND        221 

German  soldiers"  in  Belgium  would  care  to 
hear  what  these  priests  had  to  say : 

"We  speak  either  from  our  own  knowledge, 
or  from  the  stories  told  us  by  the  closely  cross- 
examined  parishioners  and  refugees  in  our 
care.  We  have  the  necessary  names,  dates 
and  addresses,  and  are  prepared  to  vouch  for 
them. 

"Near  Bucken  a  woman  was  bayoneted. 
When  the  Belgian  troops  had  retreated  from 
that  place,  the  Germans,  entering  it,  buried 
alive  several  Belgian  wounded  who  refused  to 
tell  in  what  direction  the  Belgian  troops  had 
gone.  The  people  of  Bucken  managed  to 
rescue  some  of  these  wounded,  who  are  still 
alive  to  testify  to  what  was  done  to  them. 

"Near  Malines,  Germans  found  a  Belgian 
boy  wandering  in  the  fields.  He  is  believed  to 
have  been  looking  for  the  body  of  his  dead 
father.  Those  soldiers  found  death  for  him : 
they  tied  him  fast  to  two  dead  bodies,  and  thus 
he  remained  until  some  friends  discovered  and 
loosed  him,  sixty  hours  afterward. 

"The  entire  milk-supply  was  commandeered 


222       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

by  the  Germans  at  Jette.  It  was  more  than 
they  needed,  but  they  refused  to  give  any  to  the 
children.  What  they  could  not  use,  they 
wasted. 

"A  priest  in  a  village  near  Louvain  gathered 
all  the  women  and  children,  and  all  the  men 
and  boys  unfit  for  military  service,  into  his 
church  and  his  own  house.  Then  he  went  to 
the  invading  Germans  and  told  their  command- 
ing officer  what  he  had  done.  He  gave  his 
word  that  no  militant  act  would  be  committed 
by  these  people  in  his  care.  The  officer's  reply 
was  a  grim  joke.  He  ordered  ten  men  brought 
from  the  sacristy  to  be  shot.  When  the  men 
came  out,  they  were  told  to  run  at  their  best 
speed,  and  as  they  ran,  the  soldiers  and  officers 
shot  over  their  heads  into  the  air.  One  of  the 
women  left  in  the  church  died  from  fright. 

"In  Malines  a  civilian  feared  for  his  wife 
and  newly-born  child.  He  refused  to  surren- 
der the  revolver  that  was  his  only  weapon. 
Instead,  he  barricaded  himself  in  his  house  and, 
when  the  German  soldiers  attacked  it,  he  shot 
some  of  them.     The  enemy  forced  an  entry. 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND        223 

They  killed  him:  he  had  resisted  them.  But 
that  was  not  the  extent  of  what  they  did. 
Having  killed  the  man  that  opposed  them,  they 
rushed  upstairs  to  where  the  unoffending  wife 
lay.  Her  too  they  killed.  The  baby  they  flung 
to  its  death  out  of  a  window." 

Does  all  that  sound  incredible?  The  priests 
said  it.     I  have  merely  set  it  down. 

Some  testimony,  of  course,  you  may  doubt 
if  you  care  to.  This,  for  instance.  It  came 
from  lips  that,  for  my  part,  I  do  not  care  to 
doubt — from  a  Belgian  nun,  the  nurse  of  two 
injured  Belgian  ladies,  a  mother  and  a  daugh- 
ter: 

'There  was  a  girl  I  knew  in  Vise,  a  good 
girl.  Prussian  soldiers  attacked  her.  For 
what  they  did,  if  there  are  words,  I  do  not  know 
them.  Seventeen,  she  was.  If  you  could  go 
to  Maastricht,  you  would  learn  for  yourself. 
She  is  in  hospital  there,  that  girl." 

One  wondered  how  much  drink  and  blood- 
lust  had  to  do  with  these  things,  and  how  much 
the  close  daily  acquaintance  of  horror  and  the 
constant  expectation  of  death. 


224       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

"It  is  not  the  soldiers,"  one  old  man  from 
Compenhout  explained :  "it  is  the  wine  that  does 
it.  They  do  not  seem  to  understand  wine ;  they 
drink  too  much  of  it.  Oh,  it  is  impossible  to 
conceive  how  much  wine  they  drink,  those 
Prussians — officers  and  men,  monsieur!  You 
would  not  believe.  Naturally,  they  become 
drunk.  After  their  day's  work — that  is  what 
they  call  it:  their  day's  work — they  become 
drunk.  Drunk,  one  of  them  shoots  a  citizen, 
insults  a  girl,  or  strikes  his  companion  who, 
also  drunk,  retaliates.  Damage  so  done  must 
be  blamed  on  somebody,  and  the  drunken  men, 
ashamed,  will  not  put  the  blame  upon  them- 
selves, where  it  belongs.  So  they  blame  the 
people  of  the  village,  and  that  starts  the  mas- 
sacre.    It  is  very  simple,  really." 

As  for  the  alleged  provocations  to  massacre, 
when  Belgian  citizens  say  that  they  did  not 
offer  resistance  to  the  invaders,  I  am  inclined 
at  once  to  believe  them,  and  this  for  the  reason 
that,  in  the  few  cases  in  which  they  did  offer 
armed  resistance,  I  have  found  them  ready  to 
admit  it.     Herve  and  Battice,  in  the  neighbor- 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND         225 

hood  of  Philippeville,  offer  casese  in  point: 
"Yes,  we  fought,"  a  cripple  chuckled.  "We 
were  old  men  and  little  boys;  they  would  not 
have  us  in  the  army;  but  we  protected  our 
homes:  we  fought — name  of  a  name,  how  we 
fought!  We  killed  many  a  gray-coat  before 
they  conquered.  And  then?  Oh,  then  they 
made  fifty  of  us  bury  the  Germans  we  had 
killed.  It  took  us  four  days,"  the  man  proudly 
added. 

"And  they  did  not  hurt  any  of  you?" 
"Naturally,  they  killed  us — all  but  me  and  a 
comrade.  When  their  dead  were  buried,  they 
made  us  dig  one  great  trench.  We  knew  what 
that  trench  was  intended  for.  They  made 
forty-eight  of  us  sit  on  its  edge,  and  shot  them. 
My  friend  and  I,  they  made  us  push  in  the 
bodies  that  had  not  fallen  in  and  then  fill  up  the 
trench.  They  marched  us  off  as  prisoners.  I 
hid  in  a  field  one  night  and  got  away." 

In  one  of  the  carriages  of  the  special-train 
to  Liverpool-street,  sit  a  husband  and  wife, 
peasants  whose  house  had  been  battered  from 
over  their  heads.     The  man's  face  is  haggard; 


226        IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

his  eyes  are  dazed ;  his  hands,  folded  in  his  lap, 
tremble.  The  woman's  cheeks  are  red  and 
bloated  from  tears;  she  clutches  a  baby  to  her 
breast.  The  members  of  the  relief-committee 
question  them,  but  the  man  is  too  stunned  to 
speak,  and  it  is  long  before  the  woman  can  find 
words. 

"We  had  two  children,"  she  says  at  last: 
"this  baby  and  a  girl  four  years  old.  We  all 
ran  away  together.  There  was  a  river  to  cross 
in  the  night,  and  many  trying  to  cross  it.  Our 
boat  was  so  crowded  that  the  water  came  in. 
We  thought  we  were  all  together,  but  when  we 
reached  land,  my  little  girl  was  missing.  It 
was  impossible  even  to  return  and  look  for 
her".  .  . 

When  the  train  had  been  met  at  its  London 
station,  when  the  refugees  were  being  led  to  the 
conveyances  awaiting  them,  and  when  the 
crowd  was  slowly  melting  away,  somebody 
noticed  that  one  refugee  had  been  momentarily 
forgotten. 

This  was  an  old  woman  who  sat  wearily 
against  the  wall.  Her  coarse  clothes  were 
mud-spattered.     Under  the  edges  of  the  shawl 


Dl  ED 

J  lie-  treasure  with  which  the  must  begin  life  anew  at  eighty 


BELGIUM  IN  ENGLAND        227 

that  covered  her  head,  the  hair  crept,  gray  and 
scant.  She  hid  her  face  in  hands  hardened 
by  years  of  patient  toil,  but  between  her  ringers 
one  caught  a  glimpse  of  thin  cheeks  covered 
with  a  mesh  of  tiny  wrinkles. 

"Are  you  alone?"  one  asked  her. 

She  did  not  speak.  Her  hands  still  to  her 
face,  she  nodded. 

"Have  you  no  relatives?" 

She  shook  her  head. 

"Nor  friends?" 

She  shook  her  head. 

"They  are  all  lost  or — dead?" 

Again  she  nodded. 

"No  home  ?     Your  home  is  lost  too  ?" 

Her  home  was  lost  too. 

"And  no  money?" 

She  lowered  her  hands.  She  fumbled  in  the 
'depths  of  her  skirt.  She  drew  out  a  knotted 
handkerchief  and  unknotted  it.  There  lay  her 
entire  capital,  the  guarded  treasure  with  which 
she  must  begin  life  anew  at  eighty  years:  three 
francs,  fifty  centimes. 

Seventy  cents. 


IX 


"hands  across  the  sea" 

To-day,  in  what,  a  few  months  since,  was  a 
prosperous  and  peaceful  country,  a  nation 
stands  on  the  bread-line. 

Belgium  is  starving.  She  is  starving,  in 
spite  of  all  that  England,  herself  staggering 
under  the  heaviest  native  burden  in  her  history, 
can  nobly  do  for  her.  She  is  starving  in  spite 
of  such  help  as  France,  herself  in  a  death- 
struggle  with  an  invading  army,  is  marvelously 
rendering.  She  is  starving  in  spite  of  those 
endeavors  which  Germany,  now  that  the  first 
madness  of  battle  has  passed,  is  making  to  re- 
pair something  of  that  ruin  which  she  has  her- 
self inflicted.  These  nations  are  at  war;  their 
most  is  hopelessly  inadequate.  Belgium  is 
starving. 

There  is  no  man  that,  having  known  Bel- 
gium up  to  the  fatal  August  of  19 14  and  then 

228 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     229 

returned  to  it  three  months  later,  would,  if  he 
had  not  read  the  newspapers,  believe  it  to  be 
the  same  peaceful  country  that  he  had  loved. 
Even  the  printed  and  the  spoken  word  are  im- 
potent to  picture  the  present  desolation. 
Whole  cities  are  empty,  whole  towns  destroyed, 
whole  villages  mere  piles  of  shattered-  stone 
and  mortar,  whole  districts  of  farmland 
stripped  and  trampled  bare.  Such  factories 
as  are  not  in  ashes  are  closed  for  lack  of  raw 
material  and  market.  The  crops  have  van- 
ished, and  there  is  no  seed  to  renew  them. 

What  this  means  to  the  people — the  home- 
less, scattered  and  dispossessed  women,  chil- 
dren, cripples  and  old  men — it  is  easier  for  you 
to  imagine  than  for  me  to  tell.  Those  arc  the 
sufferers:  the  old  men  and  cripples,  the  women 
and  little  children.  Thousands  of  families  are 
broken  up,  their  members  tramping  separately 
the  highways  and  byways,  ignorant  of  one  an- 
other's whereabouts  or  fate.  They  sleep,  un- 
protected, beside  the  roads.  They  comb  the 
ash-heaps;  they  scrape  the  dirty  bits  of  tin  that 
once  were  filled  with  condensed  milk.     Seven 


230       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

millions  are  in  want;  one  million  four  hundred 
thousand — and  that  number  mounts  daily — are 
absolutely  without  food  of  their  own  providing. 
Thirty  thousand  babies  have  been  born  in  Bel- 
gium since  August  last.  And  now  winter  has 
come,  and  disease  is  at  hand,  to  complete  the 
destruction  of  a  country  that  War,  bending  all 
the  ingenuity  of  modern  Science  to-  its  uses, 
has  poured  forth  a  fabulous  fortune  to  devas- 
tate. 

This  is  what,  until  last  summer,  was  "Smil- 
ing Belgium." 

England's  work  for  these  innocent  sufferers, 
the  preceding  chapter  has  already,  however 
inadequately,  described.  What  France  is  do- 
ing the  newspapers  have  carefully  chronicled. 
By  the  terms  of  diplomatic  agreements  made 
since  the  war  began,  Belgium  is  France's  ward 
and  England's.  By  the  terms  of  the  Hague 
Convention,  made  when  the  war  was  still  only 
a  thing  for  alarmists  to  dream  about,  she  is  the 
care  of  all  the  world.  But  by  the  place  that 
the  United  States  of  America  has  stubbornly 
and  splendidly  maintained  in  the  face  of  all 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     231 

threats,  and  of  every  temptation  toward  en- 
tangling and  war-involving  foreign  alliances — 
by  the  reputation  that  we  have  grandly  achieved 
as  the  champion  of  distress,  the  protector  of  the 
weak  and  the  savior  of  the  perishing  in  what- 
ever portion  of  the  globe — Belgium  is  ours  to 
feed  and  house  and  clothe  until  that  day  when 
she  can  once  more  feed,  house  and  clothe  her- 
self. 

I  have  tried  to  indicate  what  England  has 
done  for  Belgium — not  what  the  Government 
has  done  for  the  Government  of  Belgium,  but 
what  the  English  people  have  done  for  the 
Belgian  people — and  I  have  given,  perhaps,  too 
much  space  to  it ;  but  my  endeavor  was  to  show 
the  awakening  and  extent  of  the  English 
people's  sense  of  their  duty  to  the  people  of 
Belgium,  in  order  that  I  might  forestall  the 
possible  criticism  of  Americans  that  the  duty 
was  not  theirs,  but  Englishmen's.  If  I  have 
at  all  succeeded,  I  have  shown  thai  England, 
engaged  in  a  war  in  which  she  maintains  Bel- 
gium's claims  against  Germany,  can  do  no  more 
than  she  LS  doing,  and  that  what  she  is  doing, 


2^2       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

though  much,  is  not  enough  to  prevent  an  ap- 
palling disaster.  What  is  true  of  England  is 
true  of  France,  whose  very  territory  is  invaded ; 
and  my  only  reason  for  not  enlarging  upon  the 
aid  rendered  by  France  is  that  my  personal 
knowledge  of  it  is  far  less  than  my  personal 
knowledge  of  the  aid  rendered  by  England. 
The  willingness  to  help  among  the  German 
people  is  made  impotent  by  the  position  of  the 
Germany  army.  None  of  the  neutral  nations, 
save  our  own,  is  strong  enough  to  serve  the 
present  need. 

When  I  came  to  the  writing  of  this  chapter, 
one  peculiar  difficulty  was  presented.  I  was 
keenly  aware  of  the  agony  that  reigns  in  Bel- 
gium where  Albert,  King  of  the  Belgians,  used 
to  reign.  I  was  keenly  aware  of  the  duty  that 
lies  upon  every  man  acquainted  with  that  agony 
to  bring  home  the  truth  about  it  by  every  means 

in  his  power  to  every  eye  and  ear  that  he  can 
reach.     And  then  there  came  the  question: 

"Is  it  possible  that,  somewhere  in  America, 

there  is  somebody  cynical  enough  to  complain : 

T  have  been  tricked  into  reading  this  book  by 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     233 

the  belief  that,  sitting  at  my  ease,  I  should  be 
pleasantly  thrilled  by  pictures  of  battle,  vicari- 
ously and  safely  excited  by  the  shedding  of 
blood — and  now  it  turns  out  that  the  author  has 
been  trying  to  get  some  money  out  of  me  to  feed 
a  lot  of  people  that  never  did  anything  for 
me?'" 

I  do  not  believe  that  there  is  such  a  man  any- 
where in  the  world.  I  doubt  if  such  a  voice 
has  yet  been  heard  in  England  or  France — yes, 
or  in  Germany.  I  cannot  think  that  it  will 
remain  for  an  American  to  raise  it.  Neverthe- 
less, if  any  reader  does  feel  aggrieved  because 
I  am  now  making  a  special  plea  for  a  charity 
that  France,  England  and  Germany  endorse, 
then  I  hope  that  that  reader  will  never  read 
another  book  of  mine. 

Again,  it  has  been  said  to  me  that  all  attempts 
toward  Belgian  relief  must  expect  opposition 
from  German  sympathizers  in  America:  that  I 
flatly  question.  More:  I  appeal  directly  to  the 
German-born  residents  of  America.  Their  rel- 
atives at  home  are  in  a  country  that  is  at  war 
and  cannot  repair  the  damage  which  this  war 


234       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

has  done  in  Belgium;  by  contributing  to  the 
Belgian-relief  funds,  German-born  Americans 
in  America  can  help  to  do  what  the  vast  major- 
ity of  their  relatives  abroad  would  do  if  they 
could. 

It  is  not  my  purpose  to  propitiate  German 
sympathizers  by  suppressing  facts  that  make 
for  a  hatred  of  Prussian  militarism,  nor  is  it 
my  purpose  to  publish  impossible  stories  of  al- 
leged German  atrocities  in  order  to  wring 
sympathy  for  Belgium  from  persons  that 
would,  without  the  publication  of  such  stories, 
stand  aloof.  It  is  my  confident  belief  that  the 
authenticated  facts  are  sufficient. 

There  have  been,  for  example,  a  good  many 
narratives  about  Belgian  children  who  ap- 
peared in  England  mutilated:  their  hands 
lopped  off  by  German  soldiers.  A  child  with 
its  hands  roughly  amputated,  and  the  wounds 
uncared  for,  would  bleed  to  death.  Some  ac- 
quaintances of  a  friend  of  mine  in  Yorkshire 
advertised  that  they  would  pay  twenty  pounds 
for  every  child  brought  them  whom  German 
soldiers  had  thus  maimed — they  would  do  this 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     235 

and  engage  to  provide  for  the  children  for  life : 
the  advertisement  ran  for  several  days  in  sev- 
eral papers,  but  brought  no  response.  At  last 
I  came  upon  the  following  plausible  explana- 
tion: a  little  Belgian  lad,  separated  from  his 
parents,  had  been  brought  to  England  in 
August  by  a  kind-hearted  Englishman,  who 
found  him  wandering  near  the  French  frontier; 
both  his  hands  had  been  cut  off,  and  the  stumps 
were  still  unhealed:  he  spoke  only  Flemish, 
which  his  guardian  did  not  speak;  he  conveyed 
by  some  sort  of  signs  the  perfectly  true  infor- 
mation that  he  had  suffered  maltreatment  by 
the  invaders;  but  his  benefactors,  concluding 
that  these  sufferings  were  the  amputations  of 
his  hands,  erred,  because,  when  an  interpreter 
was  at  last  found  in  England,  the  boy  said  that 
he  had  lost  his  hands  in  an  accident  with  a 
mowing-machine  before  the  Germans  had 
reached  his  village. 

On  the  other  hand,  according  to  a  dispatch 
published  in  the  New  York  World — and  pub- 
lished, it  was  plain  to  see,  with  that  paper's 
usual  caution  when  presenting  something  that, 


236       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

while  undeniably  "news"  is  contrary  to  all  pre- 
viously received  evidence — was  a  statement  to 
the  effect  that  the  British  Government,  after 
careful  investigation,  had  found  no  final  proof 
of  "atrocities  by  German  soldiers"  in  Belgium : 
"The  report  added  that  many  Belgians  had  suf- 
fered severe  hardships,  but  they  should  be 
charged  up  against  the  exigencies  of  war."  If 
that  dispatch  correctly  quotes  an  English  gov- 
ernmental report,  then  my  reply  is  the  reply 
that  will  be  made  by  any  impartial  observer 
whose  investigation  of  the  Belgians'  stories 
has  not  been  hampered  by  duties  to  his  own 
nation  in  the  throes  of  battle.  If  by  "outrages" 
it  means  attacks  on  women,  my  reply  is  that 
even  the  testimony  of  loose  women  should  not 
be  too  lightly  neglected ;  that  the  conventionally- 
bred  women  who  have  been  attacked  suppress 
their  evidence  out  of  a  sense  of  shame;  and 
that  the  physical  evidences  found  upon  silent 
women  in  hospitals,  and  the  accounts  of  inno- 
cent girls  concerning  details  that  they  could 
not  have  invented,  remain  above  contravention. 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     237 

But  the  undisputed  data  are  sufficient  to  make 
plain  the  duty  of  every  man,  woman  and  child, 
of  every  nationality  and  creed,  who  is  possessed 
of  an  ounce  of  charity:  the  invasion  of  a  neu- 
tral country;  the  wiping  out  of  its  villages;  the 
decimation,  for  whatever  reason  and  by 
whatever  means,  of  its  population ;  the  placing 
of  seven  millions  of  its  non-combatant  citizens 
on  an  international  bread-line — these  things  are 
not  theories;  they  are  facts.  "The  exigencies 
of  war"?  Yes,  "the  exigencies  of  war." 
What  then  ? 

Nor  is  it  my  purpose  to  belittle  the  beneficent 
achievements  of  American  endeavor  in  those 
paths  of  battle  which  lie  outside  of  Belgium. 
Our  country  has  already  done  much  through- 
out the  entire  theater  of  war.  In  the  wake  of 
every  army,  it  has  done  wonders,  not  only  in 
relieving  suffering  and  distress,  but  in  widen- 
ing vastly  love  for  American  goodness  of  heart 
and  respect  for  American  efficiency,  among 
Austrians  and  Germans,  English,  Belgians  and 
French.     The  instance  of  the  American  Hos- 


238       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

pital  in  Paris  is  perhaps  the  most  familiar.  Its 
work  is  not  ineptly  shown  in  a  single  incident 
that  is  now  recalled  to  me. 

There  is  an  American  I  know  who,  after  his 
first  big  success  on  the  New  York  Stock  Ex- 
change, was  wise  enough  to  leave  the  market. 
He  went  to  London  and  lived  there  for  twenty 
years.  For  a  great  part  of  that  time  he  was 
continued  as  a  member  of  the  house-committee 
of  a  certain  well-known  club,  on  which  com- 
mittee a  prominent  English  army-officer  also 
served.  The  American  liked  the  Englishman; 
but  the  Englishman  steadily  and  triumphantly 
opposed  every  plan  that,  in  committee,  the 
American  suggested :  my  acquaintance  was  full 
of  plans  for  the  club's  improvement;  but  the 
Englishman,  one  after  another,  put  an  end  to 
them. 

When  the  war  broke  out,  the  American  could 
not  obtain  active  service  at  the  front,  but  his 
sympathies  were  with  the  Allies,  and  he  man- 
aged to  obtain  an  important  post  in  the  officers' 
pay-department,  with  an  office  in  the  rue  de  la 
Paix,  Paris.    To  that  bureau  came  daily  a 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     239 

typed  list  of  such  English  officers  as  had,  dur- 
ing the  past  twenty-four  hours,  been  admitted 
to  the  American  Hospital.  To  scan  this  was 
generally  the  duty  of  one  of  the  American's 
clerks,  but  one  day  my  acquaintance,  in  hand- 
ing the  list  to  that  clerk,  saw  that  there  was 
only  one  name  upon  it,  and  so  read  the  name. 
It  was  the  name  of  the  English  officer  who  was 
his  fellow-member  of  the  London  club's  house- 
committee.     A  visit  followed  immediately. 

The  Englishman  lay  in  bed.  One  of  his  legs 
had  been  amputated;  the  other  was  severely 
injured. 

"Well,"  said  he,  "this  puts  the  top  on !" 

"What  does?"  asked  the  American. 

"Your  coming  here  to  see  me." 

"But  why  shouldn't  I?" 

The  Englishman  gathered  his  strength. 

"Man  alive,"  said  he,  "don't  you  know  that  I 
always  used  to  dislike  you  and  your  confounded 
American  hustle  and  resourcefulness?  That 
is  why  I  opposed  everything  you  proposed  in  the 
club.  There  was  nothing  you  suggested  that 
didn't  go  against  the  grain  of  all  my  traditions 


240       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

and  sensibilities.  Now,  see  what  has  happened 
to  me.  I  was  hit  over  there  at  the  front — both 
legs  smashed.  I  was  too  weak  to  whisper,  but 
I  heard  one  stretcher-gang  discuss  my  case  and 
pass  on  because  they  said  I  was  going  to  die 
anyhow.  Then  another  squad  came  up  and 
took  me  to  one  of  the  dead-houses — which  is 
what  we  call  the  French  field-hospitals.  There 
a  young  French  surgeon,  a  mere  boy,  didn't  cut 
my  leg  off:  he  hacked  it  off — no  anaesthetics, 
mind  you,  and  all  the  nurses  busy  elsewhere. 
When  he  wanted  to  begin  on  the  other  leg  and 
said  I  should  die  if  he  didn't  amputate  it  too, 
the  pain  had  given  me  back  my  voice,  and  I  told 
him  I  preferred  to  die,  and  I  meant  it :  I'd  had 
quite  enough.  I  should  have  died,  if  a  little 
American  hadn't  found  me  and  brought  me 
here  to  the  American  Hospital  in  Paris.  Here 
a  real  surgeon  saved  my  remaining  leg,  and 
here  real  nurses  saved  my  life — Americans, 
doctor  and  all  of  them.  Here  I  saw  a  real  hos- 
pital, doing  real  work,  and  all  brought  about 
and  performed  by  just  that  American  hustle 
and  resourcefulness  that  I  had  opposed  in  you 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     241 

and  in  our  club  for  years  and  years.  I've  seen 
a  bit  of  what  that  sort  of  thing  can  do,  and 
when  I  get  well,  so  long  as  I  live,  if  anybody 
complains  of  American  methods  to  me,  I  shall 
do  my  best  to  knock  him  down." 

One  is,  then,  far  from  saying  that  Americans 
have  not  accomplished  a  great  deal.  Neverthe- 
less, one  does  not  hesitate  to  say  that  we  must 
do  more,  must  do  it  now,  and  must  do  it  in 
Belgium  and  for  the  Belgians. 

Why  should  Americans  "mix  in" ;  aren't  we 
a  peaceful  people  ?  We  are — so  were  the  Bel- 
gians!— and  because  wre  are,  we  have  "mixed 
in"  to  relieve  conditions,  and  must  continue 
mixing.  Why  should  one  take  charity  abroad  ? 
Because  charity  is  needed  abroad.  With  the 
man  who  says  that  "charity  begins  at  home," 
it  generally  stops  there,  too — when,  indeed,  it 
ever  arrives  there  at  all.  Few  of  us  are  mad 
about  Foreign  Missions;  but  I  have  rarely 
known  a  churchgoer  who  said  "I  think  Home 
Missions  ought  to  come  first,  and  T  don't  believe 
in  Foreign  Missions  until  we've  attended  to  our 
home  duties'1 — I  have  rarely  known  such  a  man 


242       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

to  be  a  conspicuous  giver  when  there  was  a  col- 
lection for  Home  Missions.  Nor  is  the  present 
a  case  for  the  spreading  of  any  religion,  or  any- 
ideal,  ethical  or  national :  it  is  a  case  of  life  and 
death. 

There  are  hard  times  in  America?  I  know 
it. — There  are  soup-kitchens  in  a  score  of 
cities?  I  know  it. — There  is  a  nightly  bread- 
line on  lower  Broadway,  and  an  afternoon 
breadline  at  the  Knickerbocker  ?  I  know  it. — 
There  are  five  hundred  thousand  persons  out 
of  work  in  New  York  alone?  I  know  it. — 
But  do  you  know  that  there  are  seven  million 
persons  destitute  in  Belgium? 

Charity  has  no  nationality  and  knows  none. 
It  is  not  a  product  of  justice;  it  is  justice.  To 
stand  with  folded  hands  and  watch  another  na- 
tion starve:  that  is  not  neutrality;  it  is  the  last 
refinement  of  enmity.  The  duty  of  America, 
we  have  been  told,  is  to  be  neutral;  then  the  duty 
of  America  is  charity. 

Than  our  relief-work  in  Belgium  there  has 
seldom  been — for  my  part,  I  think  there  has 
never  been — a  more  wonderful  example  of  how 


itudy  of    l   Group  of  Refugees,  b>  Gafton 
lum  ■  t  in  Amei 

On   iii.-  Bread  Link 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     243 

we  Americans  can  combine  generosity,  speed 
and  efficiency.  Somebody  truthfully  declared 
that  the  greatest  activity  in  the  world  to-day  is 
the  business  of  war.  But  for  the  carrying  on 
of  this  particular  war,  preparations  had  been 
making  for  two  decades.  Certainly  the  second 
greatest  activity  in  the  world  to-day  is  the 
business  of  helping  the  dispossessed  Belgian 
non-combatants — and  the  need  of  that  came 
upon  an  America  absolutely  unexpectant. 

Yet  to  Belgium  from  American  sources  there 
have  already  gone  39,550  tons  of  supplies,  mak- 
ing a  total  value  of  about  $2,373,000.  At  this 
writing,  there  are  about  51,390  tons  at  sea, 
valued  at  $3,083,400.  Loading  there  are  10,5 1  o 
tons  representing  an  expenditure  of  over  $500,- 
000.  This  makes  a  total  of  $5,956,400  and  to 
carry  it  eighteen  steamers  have  been  employed. 
There  was  the  Macsapcqua,  the  first  of  them  all, 
starting  on  her  initial  voyage  on  November 
fourth,  under  a  charter  by  the  Rockefeller 
Foundation,  which  furnished  her  cargo;  she 
readied  Rotterdam  on  the  [8th,  delivered  her 

Supplies,   returned  and,   with  3,5-7  more   tons 


244       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

valued  at  $227,131,  furnished  by  the  Belgian 
Relief  Fund,  was  back  in  Rotterdam  on  the 
1 8th  of  January.  The  Foundation  also  sent  out 
the  Neches,  from  New  York  on  December  12th, 
and  the  Ferrona,  from  Philadelphia,  on  Decem- 
ber 23rd,  and  supplied  their  13,000  tons  of  pro- 
visions. It  lent  the  Agamemnon,  which  arrived 
at  Rotterdam  on  Christmas  Day  with  a  $206,- 
000  cargo  of  25,300  tons — 260  given  by  the 
Committee  of  Mercy  and  25,040,  to  the  value  of 
$183,064,  by  the  Belgian  Relief  Fund.  The 
New  England  Committee,  at  Boston,  also  co- 
operating with  that  Fund,  sent  out  the  Har- 
palyce,  8,470  tons,  raised  $150,000  for  its 
cargo  and  sent  $30,000  to  the  Belgian  Relief 
Fund  in  New  York.  Eighteen  steamers  em- 
ployed and  twenty-one  more  under  charter :  the 
greatest  relief-fleet  that  ever  sailed  the  seas. 
The  Northwestern  Miller  carried  on  a  cam- 
paign that  brought  great  supplies  of  flour  from 
every  large  milling  center;  the  Philadelphia 
newspapers  raised  funds  by  full-page  adver- 
tisements, photographs  and  special  articles; 
newspapers  in  every  other  big  city,  and  in  many 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     245 

smaller  ones,  helped  in  the  same  way.  Com- 
mittees were  formed  and  went  to  work  through- 
out the  country.  There  are  upon  the  rolls  of 
the  Belgian  Relief  Fund  alone  the  names  of 
more  than  20,000  contributors — individuals 
and  groups  representing  close  upon  100,000 
men,  women  and  children — from  every  State 
and  territory  in  the  Union  and  from  Cuba  and 
Hawaii.  In  its  files  are  the  ill-spelled  letters  of 
the  illiterate,  the  typed  communications  of  the 
millionaire. 

Already  there  has  begun  a  movement  for 
The  Restoration  of  Belgian  Homes  and 
Households."  "This  work,"  writes  Dr.  van 
Dyke,  "while  the  same  in  spirit  and  ultimate 
purpose,  is  quite  distinct  in  form  from  that 
which  is  being  done  by  the  American  Commis- 
sion for  Relief  in  Belgium,  which  has  in  view 
the  rcvictualmcnt  of  the  whole  civil  population 
of  that  country,  whose  food  supply  has  been 
either  exhausted  or  carried  away  by  the  Ger- 
man army.  We  mean  our  title  to  cover  what- 
ever needs  to  be  done  to  enable -a  poor  family  to 
get  back  to  its  home  and  to  live  in  it.     If  the 


246       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

house  has  a  hole  knocked  in  it,  we  will  help  them 
to  mend  it.  If  a  peasant's  cow  has  been  stolen 
or  killed,  we  will  try  to  get  him  another  one. 
If  he  needs  seed  to  sow  in  his  vegetable  garden 
for  next  year,  we  will  provide  it  for  him.  In 
short,  we  will  try  to  do  what  we  can  to  put  the 
family  in  a  state  to  go  on  with  their  life  again." 
I  have  mentioned  the  Rockefeller  Founda- 
tion. Through  it  practically  all  the  details  of 
receiving  and  forwarding  by  steamer  were 
handled  for  the  Relief  Fund.  That  Foundation 
bore  the  expenses  of  ocean-transportation,  has 
itself  shipped  to  Belgium  19,957,333  pounds  of 
flour,  rice,  beans  and  bacon,  peas,  salt,  lentils 
and  coffee,  and,  exclusive  of  the  cost  of  hand- 
ling and  transportation,  has  contributed  to  the 
relief  of  Belgium  some  $1,100,000.  It  has 
spent  in  Belgian  relief-work,  or  partly  directed 
the  expenditure,  of  $1,500,000  in  cash.  Now  it 
is  planning  to  provide  a  colony  of  a  hundred 
thousand  Belgian  refugees  with  raw  materials 
and  machinery  for  the  manufacture  of  clothes : 
"those  articles  of  clothing  of  which  there  is  the 
most  desperate  need."     But  it  still  stands  ready 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     243 

to  help  the  other  branches  of  relief-work  with" 
which  it  at  first  allied  itself  simply  to  organize 
the  shipping-facilities  and  from  which  it  has 
withdrawn  only  because  its  work  in  this  direc- 
tion has  now  been  satisfactorily  accomplished. 
The  Commission  for  Relief  in  Belgium,  at  71, 
Broadway,  and  the  Belgian  Relief  Committee, 
at  10,  Bridge  Street,  New  York,  are  thus  the 
chief  organizations  of  Belgian  relief  in  the 
United  States.  Take  the  case  of  the  latter. 
In  the  first  four  months  of  its  existence,  ending 
January  5th,  it  organized  scores  of  branches 
and  formed  a  system  that  perfected  the  co- 
operation of  scores  more  of  independent  bodies ; 
it  became  a  collecting-agency,  tapping  every 
district  in  the  United  States;  it  became  a  buy- 
ing-agency,  purchasing  the  best  supplies  at  the 
lowest  figure;  it  secured  through  the  Rocke- 
feller Foundation  steamers  for  carrying  its 
cargoes,  and  through  the  American  ministers 
at  London  and  Brussels,  and  the  Commission 
and  the  Comite  Central  de  Secours  et  d' Ali- 
mentation of  Belgium,  efficient  distribution  of 
supplies.     It  had  collected,  during  this  quarter 


248       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

year,  in  cash  $776,475.85,  in  food  about  $700,- 
000  worth  and  in  clothing  about  $35,000  worth 
— a  total  of  $1,511,375.58.  By  its  careful 
systematizing,  by  the  powerful  influences 
placed  at  its  disposal  and  by  the  self-sacrifice 
of  its  staff,  it  has  prevented  all  waste,  duplica- 
tion and  overlapping;  is  able  to  make  its  pur- 
chases with  its  ringer  on  the  pulse  of  the  market 
and  its  eye  on  constant  maritime  and  cable 
advices  regarding  steamer-availability  and  the 
requirements  of  the  hour  when  cargoes  are  due 
to  arrive  at  the  distribution-centers.  The  fact 
that  the  cost  of  express  and  freight  shipments 
to  New  York,  and  all  ocean  transportation  has 
been  handled  for  it  without  cost  by  the  Rocke- 
feller Foundation  or  by  the  Commission,  makes 
it  possible  for  each  contributor  to  know  that 
ninety-nine  cents  out  of  every  dollar  he  gives 
it  will  buy  ninety-nine  cents'  worth  of  pure 
food  at  the  lowest  price  and  put  that  ninety- 
nine  cents'  worth  of  pure  food  into  the  mouths 
of  the  starving. 

To-day   I   walked   down   to   the   Maritime 
Building  on  Bridge  Street,  where,  in  a  room  on 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     249 

the  first  floor,  are  now  this  Fund's  headquar- 
ters.    You  must  know  the  place.     As  office- 
buildings  go  in  New  York,  where  they  seem  to 
rise  in  a  night,  this  office-building  is  already  old 
and  white  with  briny  traditions.     Its  windows 
bear  the  names  of  many  a  shipping-company: 
the  Cunard,  the  Holland-American,  the  Rus- 
sian-American,     the      Norwegian-American. 
The  ground-glass  panels  of  its  many  doors  dis- 
play the  names  of  foreign  firms ;  you  can  almost 
smell  the  odors  of  faraway  ports,  you  do  hear 
the  echoes  of  strange  tongues  along  its  halls. 
Now,  in  at  least  that  one  part  of  it,  pretty 
American   typists   clatter   at   their   machines, 
American  charity-workers  pore,  upon  small  pay 
and  through  long  hours,  over  appeals  and  sub- 
scriptions,   ledgers,    invoices,    bills-of-lading, 
manifests,  and  sit  at  the  ends  of  lines  that  not 
only  extend  across  the  seas,  but  form  a  web 
one  strand  or  another  of  which  passes  close  to 
every  city,  village  and  farmhouse  in  the  United 
States.     American   financiers  put  aside  enor- 
mous operations  to  come  here  and  help;  Ameri- 
can men  and  women  of  narrow  means  send  here 


250       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

a  little  of  their  little;  Belgian  refugees  appear 
to  seek  reunion  with  their  lost  relatives  and  any 
work  that  can  be  procured  for  them ;  and  from 
here  goes  out  the  food-supply  of  Belgium. 

Whoso  does  not  want  to  contribute  to  the 
Belgian  Relief  Fund  should  avoid  visiting  its 
offices  immediately  after  the  arrival  at  New 
York  of  any  of  the  boats  bearing  Belgian 
refugees.  Those  refugees  are  few  in  number, 
and  this  for  the  excellent  reason  that  only  a 
small  number  can  get  to  America;  but  such  as 
do  come  here,  bear  Belgium's  strongest  appeal 
in  their  own  eyes. 

The  first  group  consisted  of  a  father  and 
mother,  their  baby  and  the  father's  sister. 
Their  approach  was  timid,  their  condition  piti- 
able. The  aunt  had  been  in  America  before; 
she  spoke  French,  but  was  so  nervous  that  she 
could  scarcely  find  words  to  tell  her  story.  The 
family  had  fled  from  Antwerp  during  the  bom- 
bardment. The  father  had  been  a  licensed 
chauffeur;  now  he  wanted  any  kind  of  work 
that  could  be  given  him. 

Next  came  a  father,  mother,  baby  and  grand- 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     251 

father,  all  fit  models  for  symbolical  figures  of 
Despair.  The  younger  man  had  been  a  pilot, 
but  there  was  no  chance  for  him  to  get  such 
work  here.  For  a  time  it  seemed  that  he  must 
be  given  odd  jobs  and  his  dependents  placed  in 
an  institution.  The  family  was  steeling  itself 
for  that  one  sacrifice  more — the  sacrifice  of 
separation — when  an  Englishman  resident  in 
Xew  York  agreed  to  give  the  three  adults  work 
about  his  own  house,  the  father  as  choreman, 
the  mother  as  seamstress  and  the  grandfather 
as  gardener. 

There  is  no  need  to  run  through  the  cata- 
logue. They  are  willing  to  do  anything,  these 
Belgians — anxious  to  do  honest  work — that 
will  keep  them  from  starvation.  Tobacconists 
have  become  bakers;  blacksmiths  shovel  snow. 
They  want  work — nothing  more  do  they  ask  of 
the  Belgian  priests  that  act  as  the  bureau's  in- 
terpreters and  that  these  refugees  regard  in 
astonishment  for  an  ecclesiastic  clad,  not  in  the 
flapping  soutane  of  the  Belgian  prelate  at  home, 
but  in  the  coat  and  trousers  of  the  American 
priest.     Shoemakers,    chemists,    diamond-cut- 


252       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

ters  have  come  to  the  Belgian-relief  offices 
and  have  gone  away  as  butlers  and  valets. 
Women  teachers  and  saleswomen  have  turned 
into  domestic-servants.  There  has  been 
scarcely  a  case  of  one  man,  among  all  the  men 
that  presented  themselves,  who  was  fit  for 
military  service. 

What  I  have  written  about  the  Belgian  Relief 
Fund  could  be  paralleled  by  a  description  of  the 
work  of  the  Commission  for  Relief  in  Belgium, 
since  the  two  organizations  cooperate;  but  I 
think  I  have  said  enough  to  show  myself  far 
from  underestimating  the  generosity  toward 
Belgium  already  magnificently  manifested  in 
America.  My  point  is,  however,  that  this 
generosity  must  continue  until  the  Belgian 
fields  have  been  replanted  and  their  crops 
gathered  in.  Without  that  we  shall  have  done 
nothing  but  prolong  a  misery  ending  in  whole- 
sale death. 

It  may  be  true  that  the  duty  of  healing  Bel- 
gium's wounds  lies,  in  the  first  instance,  at  the 
door  of  Germany,  who  caused  them ;  but,  since 
Germany  cannot  heal  those  wounds,  can  we 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     253 

Americans  justify  ourselves  in  permitting  them 
to  remain  unstanched?  It  may  be  true  that, 
failing  Germany,  the  duty  devolves  upon  fight- 
ing-Belgium's allies;  but,  since  France  and 
England  can  do  no  more  than  they  have  already 
nobly  done  and  are  doing,  can  we  justify  our- 
selves in  a  failure  to  save  the  non-combatant 
Belgians  ?  It  is  indeed  true  that  the  other  neu- 
tral nations  are  helping  as  far  as  they  are  able, 
and  that  thousands  of  Americans  have  helped 
and  continue  their  aid;  but  so  long  as  these  ef- 
forts are  insufficient,  can  the  rest  of  America 
rest  content?  There  is  suffering  among  the 
non-combatants  of  each  of  the  larger  warring 
countries,  and  that  suffering  has  its  claims 
which  must  not  go  unsatisfied;  but  in  each  of 
those  larger  warring  countries  vast  districts 
remain,  and  will  remain,  not  directly  affected 
by  military  operations,  and  of  these  each  will 
help  its  neighbors  in  its  own  country,  whereas 
there  is  no  portion  of  Belgium  that  has  not  been 
stricken.  There  is  a  wast  German  population 
in  the  United  States  that  will  help  sufferers  in 

Germany,  whereas  the  Belgians  represent  but  a 


254       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

tiny  fraction  of  our  population  and  for  that 
very  reason  have  a  claim  upon  our  population 
as  a  whole. 

The  United  States  is  the  only  one  of  all  the 
world's  great  powers  that  is  not  either  at  war  or 
on  war's  brink.  "Of  all  the  foremost  nations 
of  the  world,"  as  Sir  Gilbert  Parker  has  put  it, 
"the  United  States  is  the  only  one  that  can  save 
Belgium  from  starvation  if  she  will.  She  was 
the  only  nation  the  Germans  would  allow  a 
foothold  for  humanity's  sake  and  for  Christ's 
sake  in  Belgium.  Such  an  opportunity,  such 
responsibility,  no  nation  ever  had  in  the  history 
of  the  world.  There  is  enough  food  wasted  in 
the  average  American  household  in  one  day  to 
keep  a  Belgian  for  a  fortnight.  .  .  .  They  want 
in  Belgium  300,000  tons  of  food  a  month.  The 
American  Relief  Commission  is  asking  for 
8,000  tons  a  month,  one  quarter  of  the  normal 
requirements,  one  half  a  soldier's  rations  for 
each  Belgian.  The  American  Commission 
needs  $5,000,000  a  month  until  next  harvest. 
.  .  .  Probably  there  are  18,000,000  homes  (in 
America).     How  many  will  deny  themselves  a 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     255 

meal  for  Belgium  ?"  England  can  do  no  more ; 
France  can  do  no  more;  Germany  can  do  no 
more;  the  little  countries  cannot  do  enough. 
Whatever  the  causes  or  the  origin  of  the  desola- 
tion, it  is  the  duty  of  America,  who  can,  to  feed 
the  desolate. 

Perhaps  you  think  that  my  observations  of 
Belgium's  condition  are  those  of  a  prejudiced 
observer.  I  have,  throughout  this  book,  been 
careful  in  selecting  my  material.  Of  what  I 
saw,  I  told  only  a  little;  of  what  I  heard,  I  re- 
peated only  such  stories  as  seemed  to  me  either 
to  be  in  themselves  easily  credible  or  to  come 
from  persons  whose  word  could  not  be  doubted. 
Another  visitor  to  Belgium  since  its  devasta- 
tion, Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  has  written:  "Many 
districts  are  nothing  but  grave-yards.  There 
is  no  seed  to  sow.  There  are  no  implements. 
There  is  no  money.  There  is  no  credit.  There 
is  no  transport.  .  .  .  Every  home  in  Belgium 
wants  help."  But  Mr.  Bennett  is  an  English- 
man. Let  me  now  briefly  refer  to  some  ob- 
servers who  must  be  unprejudiced. 

Dr.  P.  H.  Williams  is  a  New  Yorker.     At 


256       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

the  suggestion  of  the  Rockefeller  Foundation, 
he  volunteered  his  services  to  direct,  at  Liege, 
the  operations  of  the  American  Commission  for 
Relief  in  Belgium,  whose  headquarters  are  at 
71,  Broadway,  New  York.  This  is  what  he 
says: 

"The  impressions  I  take  away  from  Liege 
are  of  wonder  that  a  people  can  suffer  so  much 
in  silence,  and  of  admiration  for  the  bravery 
which  enables  them  to  do  it.  These  Belgians — 
all  the  suffering  Belgians — never  complain,  but 
they  never  laugh.  This  stoicism  would  mis- 
lead even  trained  observers. 

"Yet,  in  the  province  of  Liege  alone  nearly 
30,000  out  of  a  population  of  900,000  are  abso- 
lutely destitute  and  entirely  dependent  upon  the 
commission  for  food  to  keep  them  alive.  In 
the  principal  towns,  Liege,  Verviers,  and  Spa, 
distress  is  most  acute  because  the  iron  mills, 
gun-works,  rubber-tire  factories,  zinc-mines 
and  other  industries  are  closed.  Practically  the 
only  exception  is  found  in  the  coal-mines,  which 
are  being  worked  three  days  a  week  to  obtain 
fuel  to  keep  the  people  from  freezing.     During 


: 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     257 

the  month  I  was  in  Liege,  it  snowed  or  rained 
every  day,  and  when  I  left,  the  province  was 
covered  with  a  thick  blanket  of  snow. 

"A  little  girl  at  Liege  who  had  been  lucky 
enough  to  get  a  warm  petticoat  among  the 
Christmas  presents  distributed  by  the  Commis- 
sion, wrote  to  the  American  child  who  sent  it : 
'Our  dear  cure  is  dead.  Our  Burgomaster, 
who  was  a  doctor  and  gave  all  his  time  to  the 
poor,  has  been  shot.  My  father  was  shot,  and 
I  am  now  living  with  nuns,  eating  bread  sent 
from  America.'  " 

Dr.  Williams  continues:  "At  Louvain  and 
other  places  Belgian  communal  authorities  are 
laying  out  boulevards  and  other  municipal  im- 
provements planned  long  ago,  simply  to  provide 
work  for  the  people.  They  can  keep  this  work 
going  only  three  days  of  a  week,  and  in  payment 
men  are  given  paper  bonds,  which  are  not  nego- 
tiable outside  the  community  in  which  they  live, 
although  with  them  they  can  buy  their  rations 
of  bread  and  soup. 

"In  smaller  towns  which  have  been  destroyed 
men  are  being  employed  under  the  same  system 


258       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

to  pile  up  bricks  which  still  litter  the  streets  and 
tell  of  bombardments  the  world  has  almost  for- 
gotten. All  these  operations  are  in  the  hands 
of  Relief  Committees. 

"In  the  country  districts  of  Liege  Province, 
farmers  are  tilling  the  soil,  but  they  have  no 
horses,  and  they  are  being  compelled  to  sell 
their  cattle  for  slaughter,  as  cattle  fodder  has 
been  requisitioned  for  the  cavalry.  .  .  .  The 
supply  of  milk  is  rapidly  disappearing. 

"At  least  30,000  people  line  up  once  a  day  for 
bread  and  soup  at  twelve  canteens  established 
by  the  Commission  in  Liege.  You  see  no  able- 
bodied  young  men;  there  are  only  old  women, 
children  and  cripples.  The  distribution  starts 
at  8:30  o'clock  in  the  morning  and  is  not 
finished  at  the  principal  stations  until  eleven. 
The  women  place  their  half-pound  loaves  in 
net  bags,  and  old  men  wrap  theirs  in  bandanna 
handkerchiefs.  .  .  .  Then  they  go  to  another 
canteen  to  get  their  allowance  of  soup. 

"Rich  and  poor  all  have  to  send  for  bread, 
and  all  get  the  same  supply.  'Rich'  is  a  term  of 
irony,  but  I  use  it  comparatively  to  distinguish 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     259 

the  distressed  from  the  destitute.  Think  of 
steel-magnates,  university  professors,  and  well- 
to-do  women,  accustomed  to  living  luxuriously 
on  investments  which  now  bring  in  no  income, 
being  obliged  to  stand  in  a  bread-line !  Within 
a  few  months  there  will  be  no  distinctions  to 
make,  because  practically  every  person  in  Bel- 
gium will  be  dependent  on  the  canteens.  Every 
one's  private  means  will  have  disappeared. 
Before  the  Commission  got  into  operation, 
scores  of  small  towns  had  no  bread  at  all.  .  .  . 

"Belgian  physicians  are  doing  splendid  work 
both  in  relieving  distress  and  in  attending 
prisoners  and  wounded.  ...  So  far  as  I 
know  not  one  morsel  of  the  food  so  generously 
supplied  to  Belgium  is  being  taken  by  the  Ger- 
mans. It  is  only  fair  to  say  the  Germans  have 
given  us  every  assistance,  not  only  in  the  dis- 
tribution of  relief  supplies,  but  in  clearing  the 
canals  of  broken  bridges,  so  that  our  barges  can 
reach  towns  and  villages  whose  people  would 
otherwise  starve." 

Another  American  observer  is  our  Minister 
to  1  [olland,  Dr.  vail  Dyke.      (  )i  what  he  saw  in 


260       IN  A  MOMENT  OF.  TIME 

the  Belgian  refugee-camps  in  Holland  he  wrote 
in  a  letter : 

"I  visited  carefully  the  refugee  camps  at 
Rosendaal  and  Bergen  Op  Zoom,  small  towns 
which  have  entertained  from  fifty  to  eighty 
thousand  Belgian  refugees.  In  other  still 
smaller  villages  along  the  Dutch  frontier,  the 
proportion  of  refugees  to  inhabitants  was  even 
larger.  In  one  place  of  about  5,000  population 
there  were  30,000  refugees  who  arrived  within 
twenty-four  hours;  most  of  these,  however, 
went  on  to  Rotterdam,  Amsterdam,  or  The 
Hague.  At  Rosendaal  and  Bergen  Op  Zoom 
there  still  remain  about  25,000  refugees  in  each 
place.  The  condition  of  these  people  is  most 
pitiable.  For  the  most  part  they  are  without 
money.  They  arrived  in  great  haste,  and  in  a 
terrified  condition,  pouring  into  the  country  in 
crowded  trains,  and  in  such  carts  and  wagons 
as  they  could  find,  and  trudging  on  foot  along 
the  roads.  The  majority,  of  course,  are  women 
and  children,  and  there  are  many  tiny  babies, 
some  born  during  the  flight.     There  are  all 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     261 

sorts  of  sicknesses  among  the  fugitives,  but 
there  is,  as  yet,  no  epidemic.  .  .  .  The  people 
of  Holland  have  risen  magnificently  to  bear  the 
weight  of  the  great  burden  which  has  been 
thrown  upon  them.  Many  private  houses  in 
every  city  and  town  have  been  thrown  open  to 
receive  fugitives,  and  large  public  refuges  have 
been  provided.  .  .  . 

"I  motored  through  to  Antwerp,  and  made 
an  examination  of  that  city,  and  of  the  small 
cities  lying  between  there  and  Brussels.  My 
object  was  to  determine  how  far  it  would  be 
safe  for  the  refugees  to  go  back  at  once  to  Bel- 
gium. 

"So  far  as  the  attitude  of  the  military 
authorities  is  concerned,  I  believe  there  is  no 
danger  whatever  for  non-combatants  in  return- 
ing. Antwerp  itself  is  not  so  much  injured  as 
to  render  it  uninhabitable  for  the  greater  part 
of  the  population.  A  very  large  majority  of 
the  houses  are  standing  and  uninjured,  espe- 
cially in  the  poorer  quarters  of  the  city.  The 
only  serious  problems  connected  with  the  return 


262       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

of  the  refugees  to  Antwerp  are  the  water  sup- 
ply, the  question  of  employment,  and  the  ques- 
tion of  food. 

'Tn  regard  to  the  smaller  cities  in  the  neigh- 
borhood, the  case  is  entirely  different.  For 
example,  the  towns  Waelhem,  Mechelen,  Duffel 
and  Lier  are  reduced  practically  to  ruins,  and 
are  certainly  not  in  a  condition  to  receive  back  i 
more  than  one-third  of  their  ordinary  popula- 
tion. There  is,  moreover,  a  smell  of  decay  in 
the  air  which  may,  at  any  time,  breed  a  pesti- 
lence. The  resumption  of  the  ordinary  indus- 
tries of  these  places  is  absolutely  out  of  the 
question,  as  the  factories  and  workshops  .are 
all  knocked  to  pieces.  To  send  people  back  to 
their  homes  when  those  homes  no  longer  exist, 
I  believe  to  be  cruel.  There  are,  I  suppose,  ten 
or  a  dozen  other  small  towns  in  Belgium  which 
are  practically  in  the  same  condition  as  those 
I  visited,  desolate  and  uninhabitable,  half  of 
their  houses  wrecked;  a  great  many  scattered 
and  isolated  farmhouses  which  have  been  prac- 
tically destroyed;  and  a  considerable  portion  of 
the  land  under  cultivation  has  been  laid  waste, 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     263 

either  by  military  operations  or  by  inundation 
for  defense." 

I  cannot  put  the  case  better  than  it  was  put 
by  the  New  York  Nation:  "Nobody  even  pre- 
tends that  the  tale  of  woe  is  exaggerated.  We 
say  nothing  about  causes ;  we  say  nothing  about 
guilt;  what  we  are  speaking  of  is  the  fearful 
desolation  and  ruin,  the  heart-rending  distress, 
the  unspeakable  agony  of  thousands  of  non- 
combatants  who,  a  few  short  weeks  ago,  were 
dwellers  in  quiet  and  happy  homes,  and  who  are 
now  wanderers  on  the  face  of  the  earth — 
fatherless,  perhaps,  or  widowed;  homeless  and 
forlorn  and  almost  hopeless,  surely.  Concern- 
ing their  state,  there  is  unfortunately  no  room 
for  doubt  or  controversy ;  with  cities  and  towns 
and  villages  given  to  the  flames,  and  the  whole 
countryside  ravaged  by  the  countless  hosts  of 
the  invaders,  no  voice,  can  be  lifted  up  to  say 
that  the  thing  is  not  fully  as  appalling  as  it  is 
imagined.  No,  the  trouble  is  all  the  other  way. 
Imagination  is  all  too  feeble  to  body  forth  the 
truth.  The  mere  extent  of  the  misery  defies 
realization;  the  individual  horrors  of  the  scene 


264       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

are  too  infinitely  varied  to  permit  of  any  at- 
tempt to  grasp  them." 

Nor  is  the  end  yet.  A  short  time  since,  in 
conversation  with  the  King  of  the  Belgians,  one 
said  that  final  victory  could  not  long  fly  the 
Allies'  arms. 

"Yes,"  replied  the  King  sadly,  "there  is  no 
doubt  that  victory  will  come  to  our  armies ;  but, 
even  so,  what  is  to  become  of  my  poor  people  ?" 

I  heard,  at  York,  this  subject  discussed  by 
one  of  the  men  best  qualified  to  discuss  it :  Dr. 
Charles  Sarolea,  now  Belgian  consul  at  Edin- 
burgh. 

"Germany,"  he  said,  "has  committed  more 
vandalism  and  destruction  during  a  few  months 
in  Belgium  than  all  the  European  nations  who 
fought  there  for  five  hundred  years,  and  now 
the  worst  is  to  come,  because,  when  the  Ger- 
mans are  driven  back,  they  will  do  their  utmost 
to  make  their  final  stand  in  Belgium,  and  we 
shall  have  to  bombard  Belgian  cities  in  order 
to  drive  the  Germans  out.  This  is  the  greatest 
tragedy  of  the  war,  that  a  country  which 
originally  had  no  connection  with  the  quarrels 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     265 

of  the  Great  Powers  has  suffered  first,  has 
suffered  most  and  will  suffer  longest.  I  shall 
never  forget  the  melancholy  procession  of 
refugees  from  Malines  to  Antwerp  which  ac- 
companied the  retreating  Belgian  army.  The 
phenomenon  of  the  whole  nation  fleeing  was 
absolutely  unique  in  history.  And  the  fate  of 
those  Belgian  people  who  remained  is  even 
more  appalling  than  that  of  the  panic-stricken 
wanderers,  because  Belgium  is  threatened  with 
the  most  ghastly  famine  of  modern  times. 
Starvation  has  begun.  What  will  happen  when 
the  Germans  are  driven  back  into  Belgium,  and 
two  million  soldiers  have  to  live  on  the  coun- 
try?" 

That  is  an  old  phrase,  "Hands  Across  the 
Sea."  It  has  been  often  laughed  at,  often 
abused.  Perhaps  it  is  a  little  sentimental. 
Vet  we  Americans  have  more  than  once  made  it 
real,  practical,  helpful.  We  have  begun  to 
make  it  real  and  practical  and  helpful  in  the 
cause  of  the  non-combatant  Belgians;  but  un- 
it-— we  keep  on — unless,  excellent  as  our  relief- 
work  has  been,  self-sacrificing  as  it  has  been — 


266       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

we  continue  it,  day  by  day,  and  month  in  and 
month  out,  until  next  harvest-time,  Belgium, 
now  a  country  of  the  destitute,  will  have  become 
a  country  of  the  dead.  This  is  not  a  moment 
for  postponement.  What  you  can,  you  must 
give  not  to-morrow,  but  to-day — to-day,  now, 
before  it  is  too  late.  We  have  seen  that  there 
are  thousands  in  America  who  have  given; -how 
many  millions  are  there  who  have  not  ?  Those 
who  have  given  must  continue  to  give,  must 
urge  others  to  give,  each  all  that  he  can  spare. 
In  New  York  City  alone.  For  every  person 
in  New  York  City  that  has  failed  to  contribute 
there  is  across  the  sea,  "a  Belgian  woman, 
child,  infant,  old  man,  invalid — now — to-day — 
homeless,  helpless  and  in  direct  need."  Death 
keeps  the  books  and  strikes  the  balance:  for 
every  decrease  of  twenty-five  dollars,  he  will 
snuff  out  an  innocent  life. 

To  keep  this  balance  on  the  debit  side  will  be 
no  easy  task.  It  will  cost  America  $2,500,000. 
a  month  to  feed  each  starving  Belgian  only  ten 
ounces  of  bread  a  day — and  that  means  a  total 
gift  of  a  hundred-million  pounds  of  flour  every 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     267 

four  weeks.  It  is  toward  the  purchase  of  that 
vast  total  that  I  make  my  appeal  to  you.  For 
these  ten  ounces  of  bread  a  day  to  each  starving 
non-combatant  Belgian  I  confidently  ask  the 
help  of  the  American  public.  I  ask  you  to  send 
what  money  you  can  to  the  Belgian  Relief 
Fund.  When  you  send  it,  you  know  that  it 
will  be  spent  in  America  for  American  ma- 
terials, that  American  labor  will  load  the  sup- 
plies, that  American  ships  will  carry  them,  that 
they  will  be  received  by  American  agents  and 
distributed  by  American  consuls.  You  know 
this,  and  you  know  that  ninety-nine  cents  of 
your  dollar  will,  in  the  shape  of  pure  food, 
bought  at  the  lowest  price,  go  directly  to  the 
people  that  you  want  to  help. 

And  supposing  that  the  needed  help  is  given 
— supposing  that  the  people  of  the  United 
States  win  for  themselves  the  high  glory  of 
saving  all  Belgium — what  then?  What  is  to 
happen  when  this  war  has  ended? 

Ilerr  Basserman  is  leader  of  the  National 
Liberals  in  the  German  Reichstag.  The  Ber- 
lin VorwartS  quotes  him  as  saying:     "We  shall 


268       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

hold  fast  for  all  time  the  countries  which  have 
been  fertilized  by  German  blood."  Undoubt- 
edly, should  the  war  end  before  April,  Germany 
would  make  demands  which  might  lead  to  a 
suspicion  that  her  invasion  of  neutral  Belgium 
was  not  so  much  a  "military  necessity"  as  an 
endeavor  to  establish  claims  to  a  coastal  coun- 
try originally  unconcerned  in  the  conflict;  men 
would  think  that  the  whole  purpose  of  Ger- 
many's entrance  into  the  war,  however  cleverly 
concealed  at  the  time  of  its  conception,  was  the 
capture  of  Belgium's  sea-front.  But  Belgium 
and  the  Belgians  are  resolved  upon  maintaining 
their  nationality. 

I  have  been  asked  why,  if  they  are  in  such 
desperate  straits  at  home,  the  Belgians  do  not 
all  come  here.  There  are  a  dozen  good 
answers,  but  the  best  is  this :  they  can't.  The 
chief  duty  of  America  to  Belgium  lies,  at  pres- 
ent, in  Belgium.  There  the  vast  bulk  of  the 
work  must  go  forward.  Said  the  New  York 
Evening  Sim  a  little  while  since :  "There  is  to 
be  a  Belgium,  populated  with  folk  of  Belgian 
descent,  after  this  war.     It  will  mean  a  loss 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     269 

to  us,  to  every  nation  that  would  otherwise 
eagerly  welcome  the  influx  of  some  of  the  most 
desirable  human  material  in  the  world.     And 
to  the  refugees  themselves  repatriation  can  but 
wait  on  many  a  bitter  day  of  sorely  tried  hopes, 
empty  hearts  and  painful  separations.     Mow 
infinitely  more  comfortable  for  them  to  resign 
the  unrestful  promptings  of  mere  sentiment, 
and  turn  their  hands  to  taking  up  life  and  ac- 
complishing   their    own    well-being    wherever 
they  find  these  boons!     Yet  losers  though  we 
are  through  the  possible  failure  to  gain  a  heavy 
national   reenforcement  of  sound,   intelligent, 
thoroughbred  human  material,  ...  we  cannot 
but  respect  the  stubborn  purpose  in  this  people. 
Even  ...  at   the   depth  of  their  abasement, 
they  arc  tense  with  the  resolve  to  rise  as  a  na- 
tion again  .  .  .  and  to  reap,  on  some  future 
autumn  day,   their  own   fields.     The   purpose 
may  be  visionary,  or  those  holding  it  may  know 
their  own  secret  strength  to  accomplish  through 
what  the}-  endure;  in  any  case  the  unfortunates 
mmand  the  thorough  respect  <»f  those  who  in 
less  tried  countries  are  succoring  them." 


270       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

For  my  own  part,  I  do  not  believe  that  this 
purpose  is  only  visionary ;  for  my  part,  I  believe 
that,  evil  as  present  circumstances  are,  Belgium 
and  its  people  will  rise  to  a  new  strength  and  a 
new  glory  out  of  their  ashes.  The  little  coun- 
try is  a  land  of  ruin.  Beautiful  churches  and 
historic  monuments  have  crumbled  away,  which 
no  hand  of  man  can  ever  restore.  Families 
have  been  separated  which  none  can  reunite. 
Lives  have  been  lost  and  wrongs  done,  which 
nothing  can  revive  or  repair.  These  things 
are  beyond  money.  On  the  other  hand,  whole 
towns  must  be  rebuilt;  vast  industries  and 
countless  businesses  must  be  recreated;  great 
stretches  of  once  arable  land  must  be  reculti- 
vated;  an  entire  civilization  must  be  made 
anew — and  these  things  will  indeed  be  done. 
While  yet  the  masonry  of  the  past  is  warm  from 
the  fire  that  razed  it,  while  yet  the  earth  is 
damp  with  blood  and  wet  with  tears,  Belgians 
will  begin  to  erect  the  buildings  and  plow  the 
fields  of  that  Belgium  of  the  future  which  will 
be  greater  than  any  Belgium  of  the  times  that 
are  gone.     A  century — two  centuries — may  be 


"HANDS  ACROSS  THE  SEA"     271 

needed  to  complete  this  titan  task,  but,  begun 
at  once,  the  task  will  be  completed;  Belgium's 
greatest  hour  is  knocking  at  the  door  of  her 
darkest  distress  and,  through  whatever  diffi- 
culties, the  Belgians  will  meet  it  and  make  the 
utmost  of  all  it  offers.  Belgium,  crucified  and 
buried,  shall  rise  again. 

We  have  the  chance  so  to  do  that,  in  the  hour 
of  her  resurrection,  Belgium  may  say: 
"America  made  this  resurrection  possible;  from 
the  door  of  our  tomb,  it  was  the  people  of 
America  that  rolled  away  the  stone."  It  is  the 
opportunity,  it  is  the  duty,  of  the  American 
people  to  care  for  these  helpless  ones  against 
that  near  hour  when  they  shall  be  able  to  begin 
to  help,  as  they  are  so  eager  to  help,  themselves. 
Now  they  starve,  an  entire  nation,  and  only  we 
can  save  them.  Wherever  lies  the  guilt  of 
bringing  Belgium  to  her  present  condition,  so 
long  as  we  can  restore  her  and  do  not,  the  guilt 
of  leaving  to  death  her  old  men,  her  widowed 
women  and  her  little  children  will  lie  with  us. 

It  IS  useless  for  us  to  ask  ourselves  Cain's 
quest  i'  'ii : 


272       IN  A  MOMENT  OF  TIME 

"Am  I  my  brother's  keeper?" 
Duty,  if  you  wish  so  to  call  it — God,  if  you 
will — has  but  one  answer: 
"Yes." 


THE   END 


THE  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

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